‘Yes,’ I resumed as we sat down again. ‘Tracy. A great girl. At least, she was. A redhead. Taller than you. Good fun to be with. She worked as a receptionist at the med centre, in camp. There’d been nothing between us before, but after Kath was killed we gradually got together, and a few months later she moved in with me. It was fantastic the way she took over Tim as if she were his mother . . .

‘That was great – until the IRA grabbed her and Tim.’

I described the desperate struggle we’d had to recover her. ‘It took us two months – more – to get her back. And when we did, I found she’d flipped.’

‘Flipped? What is this?’

‘She’d gone out of her mind. The stress had made her ill. She was a different person. We tried everything: rest, a holiday in the sun, a shrink – a psychiatrist – but nothing worked. She recovered physically, but not emotionally. She blamed me for the whole episode. If I hadn’t been in the SAS, it never would have happened – all that crap. As a couple we couldn’t get back to where we’d been before.’

‘And?’

I sat back and took a deep breath. ‘She went away to her family, somewhere in the north. It’s more than a year since I last heard from her.’

‘And the boy?’

‘He’s seven now, doing well. He’s living with Kath’s parents in Belfast. He’s growing up a little Ulsterman.’

‘You see him?’

‘Oh yes, from time to time. We’re good buddies.’

Sasha’s mind was evidently dwelling on the IRA. ‘Why be so soft with such terrorists?’ he asked. ‘Why not eliminate all? In Chechnya we shoot many rebels, no problem.’

‘Yes – but down there a lot of innocent people got killed as well.’

‘Chechens vairy primitive people,’ Sasha said scornfully. ‘If they come to Moscow they go beggars. They make things worse.’

‘And in any case,’ I persisted, ‘you didn’t win the war.’

‘And why? Because our army has such bad equipment. Many, many shortages. No guns. No ammunition. No food. But Zheordie – I tell you something . . .’

‘What’s that?’

‘The Chechen Mafia – vairy clever at stealing gold. They have more gold than all the other Mafias collected together. Chechens are gold specialists. Drugs also. They bring drugs from Central Asia and send to Europe.’

‘What about the army?’ I asked. ‘How’s morale?’

‘The army? The Russian army?’ He looked round wildly. ‘Zheordie – if I am to speak of army, I need vodka.’

‘Is it that bad?’

He nodded.

‘Vodka, then. Anything with it?’

‘No thank you. Just vodka.’

When I handed him a double, neat, he raised the glass in my direction, smiled, called out, ‘Vzdrognem!’ and tipped it straight down. I’d got myself the same amount of water in another glass, and tipped that down with an answering ‘Cheers!’

‘Good vodka,’ he said. ‘No samogon.’