Remembering something he’d seen there, Ben walked back into Wolf’s bathroom. He was no longer interested in examining the wreckage the intruders had left in their wake. Hanging askew on the wall opposite the bath and shower unit was another, smaller, framed picture he’d barely glanced at earlier. Now he gave it closer attention. Unlike the prints in the living room, this was an original oil painting of a panoramic rural landscape, done in a more traditional descriptive style than Wolf’s little modernist collection.

It depicted a pretty, centuries-old village nestling against a starkly majestic rocky escarpment backdrop with sparsely vegetated hills in the foreground. The ancient stone buildings were tinged pink, with red terracotta roofs and overhanging balconies sloping in all directions, here and there a castle-like spired tower rising above the narrow medieval streets. The effect was so quintessentially Spanish that just looking at it as he stood here in a wrecked London apartment in the middle of the night, Ben could almost hear the chirping of the crickets and the rasp of Flamenco guitars wafting on the warm mountain breeze, smell the scent of the wild lavender and thyme that grew among the rocks, and feel the radiance of the sun beating down. It was an image you could stand and look at for a long time and lose yourself in. Ben could imagine Wolf doing just that.

The music. The guitar paintings. The landscape. Suddenly it all came together in Ben’s mind, and a memory that he hadn’t thought about in years came flashing back as vivid and sharp as the day it had happened.

Ben’s memory carried him back many years to the remote craggy wastelands of north-west Afghanistan, and a time when his SAS unit had been deployed on a reconnaissance mission to hunt for enclaves of Taliban fighters. The SAS were no strangers to some of the world’s wildest places, but the raw, savage beauty of these mountains seemed almost like another planet. After travelling for three days from the insertion point they had made no contact with the enemy. In fact on this occasion, though they didn’t know it yet, Ben and his men would be returning to base without a shot fired. Which was highly unusual for them; but they were alert and ready for a surprise attack as they made camp on the third night, on high ground overlooking a mountain valley deep inside hostile territory. The dozen-strong unit gathered in a craggy hollow where they could observe any enemy approach for miles around. They sat hunkered down close to their weapons while a pot of coffee bubbled and spluttered on a portable stove. Ben had been famous among his men for his in-the-field coffee-making skills.