‘Because you were in a bad way when you came in here,’ said Danni. ‘I mean, I thought Regiment guys could get good jobs in industry. Or go out to Iraq, and earn two or three grand a week in security.’

Not me, thought Porter. I flunked it. And once you’ve done that, there is no way back.

‘I had …’ Porter paused, taking a sip of the wine, already wondering if she might have something stronger tucked away in her handbag. What was it I had exactly? he wondered? Why couldn’t I get back into the world again? Maybe if I’d been able to figure out an answer to that I wouldn’t have been searching around at the bottom of so many beer glasses all my life. ‘I was out in the Lebanon. A long time ago. I was going in with my unit to get a hostage out, but I fucked it up.’

‘Go on,’ she whispered.

He looked up at Danni, his expression solid and strong. He held up his left hand. ‘That’s how I lost these,’ he said, nodding towards the missing fingers. ‘But that wasn’t the worst of it. I lost three guys from my unit, good men. It was my fault, you see. My own sodding fault. They’d have lived if I hadn’t …’

Porter stopped talking, leaving the sentence hanging between them. It felt strange to be talking about it. He’d tried to discuss it with Diana, but that was years ago, soon after he came back, but she was so preoccupied with the baby she’d hadn’t had any time to listen to him, and pretty soon he found it easier just to have another drink and forget about it. Since then, he’d never spoken about it to anyone. He just brooded on it himself, burying the story deeper and deeper within himself, until it was as much a part of him as the blood running through his veins.

‘If you hadn’t what …?’

He shrugged, emptied the wine glass into the back of his throat, and refilled it from the bottle. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters to me.’

‘I let a kid live, and then he killed my three mates.’

Danni edged forward on the bed, so that there was only a couple of feet separating them. ‘And you think going back there will fix it for you?’ she said.

She was looking straight at him, her bright blue eyes alive with curiosity, with a hunger for knowledge that Porter found puzzling. ‘I sure as hell hope so,’ said Porter with a shrug.

She edged another few inches closer. With her left hand, she was brushing a lock of hair away from her face, and her right hand was resting on the top of the bed. Slowly, she uncrossed and then crossed her legs again, and Porter was struggling to keep his eyes away from her. She was so close to him that Porter couldn’t escape the heady smell of the perfume splashed across her body.