I feel heat in my chest. ‘I need to be able to trust you, Cain. This isn’t helping.’

‘That’s rich, Lina. I just learnt from a reporter that you’ve been stood down from work.’

‘You know I’ve never touched drugs, Cain.’

The tiny muscle at his jaw bulges; he tilts his head back. ‘I don’t like to talk about what happened to us in Afghanistan, Lina. I don’t like who I was, who we were, what we did. It changes you.’

They trained us to kill but they can’t untrain us, I think of those words in the leaked letter Skelton wrote his mother.

‘I know but that’s not good enough right now, Cain. Trust me, please.’

‘The psychologist –’

‘I don’t care what the psychologist said. Tell me what that phone call was about.’

He closes his eyes hard, like a man battling a migraine. ‘Skelton killed that family, but he did it to protect me.’

‘Protect you from what?’

His eyes are still squeezed closed. ‘It was an accident. We were so highly strung, so paranoid after the attack. When we got to that village, we were looking for any threat. I rushed a house and it looked like a man was reaching for a gun but he wasn’t. I had already pulled the trigger.’

The nightmares. It’s the first thing that comes to me. What if they’re not from the blast that almost killed him but from this? ‘You killed him?’

He opens his eyes now, his nostrils flare. He gives the smallest nod. ‘It changes you,’ he says. The sadness in his eyes. He’s talking about me now. I should have been the one to save you. He didn’t want me to live with the weight of a death on my mind. The guilt that comes on so suddenly, so fresh and raw like it happened yesterday. He lives with it too.

‘You were at war,’ I say. ‘You can’t blame yourself for the rest of your life, or live in fear of it coming out.’

‘It wasn’t the first unlawful killing or the last. Loads of blokes killed civvies. But this one was investigated.’

‘It won’t come out now, Cain. And if it did you could always just explain.’

‘Don’t be naïve, Lina. Axel was going to testify with me, that it was all Skelton. Instead of us both going down, Axel and I decided it would just be Trent. Then Trent took his life.’

The nightmares, the guilt. He’s got a secret that could ruin his life and so he gambles and drinks, he has nightmares and snaps at people at the gym.

‘It’s not your fault, Cain. You can’t carry all that around alone.’