‘I needed a drink,’ snapped Porter.

‘What the hell for?’ shouted Layla. ‘We’re pinning everything on you. We’re paying you two hundred and fifty grand. The last thing we need is a fucking wino crawling off the plane too drunk to even remember his own name.’

‘One drink, that’s all I bloody needed.’

‘It’s always one drink, then one more,’ said Layla. ‘You were a sodding tramp. We’ve taken you in, given you a chance, but we damn well expect to be repaid. That means you deliver what we expect. That’s the deal, and if you break it, we’ll fucking break you. You hear me, John Porter. We’ll break you like a fucking matchstick.’

Porter paused for a moment. He could already feel the vodka he had drunk a few moments ago hitting his bloodstream. The plane was starting to balance out again, but the weather was still rough, and the undercarriage was thumping against pockets of air. The alcohol was already working its lethal magic, calming his nerves and soothing his anxieties. People said the juice stopped you from thinking straight, but they were wrong. He could always see things much more clearly when he had some alcohol inside him, and right now he could see there was some truth to what she was saying. He’d had nothing, not any kind of life to speak of, but now he had a daughter again, and he’d had done something for her, and that was something he could take to his grave and feel proud of. He had the Firm to thank for that. It didn’t mean he couldn’t handle a drink, though. She was wrong about that.

‘What the hell do you know about soldiering?’ he said, levelling a stare right into her eyes. ‘There are only two rations every commander in history has made sure his men have plenty of before they go into battle. Booze and smokes. In the trenches of the Somme, that was all the blokes lived on. Rum and tobacco. And you know why? Because it is fucking frightening. Most blokes wouldn’t be able to fight unless they were too drunk to know any better.’ He paused again, waiting for the plane to pass through another patch of rough weather. ‘Well, this is a battle, and I reckon it’s going to be a bloody nasty one,’ he continued, his voice dropping down to no more than a whisper. ‘And I’m going to need all the courage I can get. Some men get it from a church, and some from their country. I get mine from a bottle, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘I don’t care about that,’ Layla snapped, her face red with anger. ‘One more, and we’ll turn straight round and go home.’

The stewardess was standing next to them, her eyes switching nervously from Porter to Layla and back again. Trouble, thought Porter. It was what every stewardess feared the most. ‘I’ll have to ask you to take your seats,’ she said. ‘The captain –’