We looked up at the photograph of the seven soldiers, and at the boy dead centre, dark glasses, unsmiling, hair swept back off that high forehead. I pictured him folding his clothes on the beach at Amalfi and walking into the sea.

‘If they don’t hate each other,’ I said, ‘then who does?’

Mallory said, ‘Oh, everyone hates them.’

‘Sir?’

‘It’s that very British hatred with class resentment at its core. We pity the small boys packed off to their boarding schools where they wet the beds and cry for their mothers but we end up wanting to be them, because they have something that the rest of us will never have.’

Mallory considered the big screen and the grinning boys in their uniforms.

‘It’s more than confidence,’ he continued. ‘It’s more than the sense of entitlement. It’s the total and unequivocal certainty that tomorrow belongs to them.’ He smiled at me. ‘Who wouldn’t want to feel like that?’

The next day I drove us to Potter’s Field.

Chapter 13

13

‘NOW GET DOWN on the ground,’ Guy Philips said.

Fifty boys, shivering in their running shorts and vests, stared at their sports master. They grinned foolishly at each other, still hoping that he might be joking. A bitter wind whipped across the school playing fields. Three in the afternoon and it already seemed to be getting dark.

‘Now!’ he screamed.

And they saw he wasn’t joking.

Slowly they got down on all fours. The rugby pitch had been churned to mud by ten thousand studmarks and their hands and knees made squelching sounds as they tested the ground. Philips walked between them in his pristine white tracksuit, a grin spreading across his red face. He was enjoying himself.

‘Not doggy style, toads. On your bellies. On your backs. Roll around in it. That’s good. Now on your back, Knowles. Give it a good old wriggle, Jenkins. Come on, Patel, you big girl, rub it a bit harder than that!’

Soon their running gear – white shorts and vests trimmed with the purple and green of Potter’s Field – was rank with mud and damp. But Philips left them down there as he strode across to where we were watching.

‘A five-miler through the woods and I’ll be with you after a shower,’ he said to Mallory. ‘Should be an hour plus another thirty minutes or so for the retards. That all right?’

Mallory nodded, and Philips jogged back to his boys. The sports master was in a good mood.

‘Get up, get up!’ he barked, as if it had been their idea to roll around in the mud. ‘Now you don’t have to worry about getting your knees dirty, do you?’

‘Sir, no, sir,’ they chorused.

‘Then let’s get cracking. Across the fields, through the woods to the Old Mill and back in time for evensong.’