And it was salutary how a few poor choices could scuttle you, information it would have been useful to have had at the outset. There had been a house once, he remembered that much, and he was pretty sure it was still standing, and that his ex-wife still enjoyed the breakfast bar, the bedroom extension and the patio that had been intended to both improve their quality of life and increase the property’s value. The latter had almost certainly happened—he’d never heard of a property in London losing value, short of it burning down—but was no longer of direct relevance to him, a matter that, for the avoidance of doubt, had been clarified in a courtroom. There’d been a pension too, until he’d taken advantage of the drawdown opportunity to bury a huge chunk of it in his former brother-in-law’s foolproof investment opportunity, a mirage of such IMAX proportions that he genuinely couldn’t recall the details of the product at its heart. Skateboards for mermaids? Feline Zimmer frames? Some such fucking thing. And meanwhile here he was, wrong side of sixty, catering to the Service’s has-beens. A milkman.

“Milkman” was a term of contempt, of course. Agents were joes; desk jockeys were suits. They were different ways of fighting the same battles, and while each had been known to look down on the other, like characters inhabiting the same Escher staircase, they shared a commonality neither would deny; a sense of purpose. A milkman, though, had failed to make a mark in either endeavour, and could be trusted to do no more than his weekly round: touching base with the pensioners and the walking wounded; those who’d served behind whatever lines had been drawn in their day, and now required support in their evening. Not that all were elderly, or, if the truth mattered, entirely honourable. Solomon Dortmund, though, had been a jewel. Had it ever occurred to Solly to view John Bachelor with disdain, it was a thought he’d have smothered in its cradle.