She’d been thinking about this ever since Ludo and Nipper had burst into their private world and pulled it apart. The way she saw it, there was no choice. She had to somehow stop this – or she would be looking over her shoulder forever, because Harlan wouldn’t let this go. You didn’t say ‘no’ to Harlan Stone, so it was inevitable: one day someone would show up and kill her, maybe quickly if she was lucky or slowly if she was not, and she was afraid of that. Terrified. So she had to strike first.

Jack was silent for a moment.

Then he said: ‘These people fight dirty.’

Belle turned her head and in the blue light of the moon Jack saw her scarred cheek pucker as she smiled.

‘So do I,’ she said.

137

Next day, she went out into the kitchen and there was Jack, sitting calmly at the breakfast table as if nothing was wrong, as if the whole damned world hadn’t gone crazy in the space of one day. They’d been happy here, had fallen into a routine. She had halfway fallen in love, she thought, but maybe he wasn’t capable of that, maybe all he saw in her was easy meat because she was scarred, desperate – and available.

She poured tea from the pot, slopped in milk, sat down opposite him. He watched her.

Then to her surprise he said: ‘I was fifteen when I left home, left here, for the first time.’

Belle frowned at him. ‘Why so early?’

‘My father died when I was twelve. After that, my mother had a string of boyfriends. Some of them were OK. The last one wasn’t. He didn’t want a hairy-arsed resentful teenager mooching about the place and he made that very clear. He beat the crap out of me one day right in front of her, and she didn’t say a word or lift a finger in my defence. Next day, I was gone.’

Belle said nothing. She was afraid that if she did speak, he’d stop. All too clearly she could picture him as a vulnerable boy, his dad dead, his mother mocking his father’s memory with a succession of lovers. One of them beating him, hurting him. It was awful.

‘Maybe she was scared of him?’ suggested Belle.

‘If someone was beating up a child of yours, what would you do?’

‘I’d kill them,’ said Belle without even having to think about it.

‘At sixteen I joined up. Served in Northern Ireland. I was a sniper and then a section commander in the paras. Then I moved into special forces in the Falklands. I left the military and came back here because my mother was ill. Dying.’

Belle thought about that. His fitness. His focus. It explained so much. She was shocked, incredulous.

‘Oh my Christ,’ she said. ‘Special forces? You’re SAS, is that what you’re telling me?’