They left the conservatory and the colonel led them through the house and upstairs, past more collections of family photos on the walls showing grinning, gap-toothed kids and grandkids. Passing an open bedroom door, Monty stopped at the end of a passage and produced a ring of keys with which he proceeded to unlock another door. He flipped on a light switch and led them inside. At one time, the room had been a little girl’s bedroom and still had faded pink wallpaper with small teddy bear motifs. But the Montgomerys’ daughter had long since grown up, and now the room served as the colonel’s study. Two tall filing cabinets stood beside a desk piled high with folders and papers.

‘You’re looking at twenty years of work,’ the colonel said as he pulled open a filing cabinet drawer and began sifting through cardboard suspension files. ‘I’ve called in more favours than I care to mention, spent fortunes on private investigators, surveillance and bribes to informants or for obtaining illegal copies of police reports, staked my entire reputation and at times risked alienating my own family. An obsession, I’ll admit, but in my opinion a worthy one. The sooner the Dishonourables are rounded up and jailed, or preferably strung up, the better. Now let’s see if we can’t find your man somewhere among this lot.’

The files were arranged by regiment and subdivided into squadron and unit, according to where each subject had been in his military career when it had all come to a crashing end. Monty had hundreds of individual dossiers on dishonourably discharged former soldiers covering a period of many years, and the job of sifting through them all would have taken hours if the dead guy’s regimental tattoo hadn’t narrowed things down for them. Monty lifted out the file for the Parachute Regiment and carried it over to the cluttered desk.

Ben had known a lot of Paras in his time, and admired them enormously. He was happy to see that relatively few men from that elite airborne infantry unit had ever fallen so low as to receive a DD. Of those twenty-nine whose dubious activities over the years had caused them to be included in Monty’s records, some of the dossiers were thicker and some scantier depending on how thoroughly he’d been able to research the man’s background. Eight of the older files were stamped DECEASED. Monty explained how, where his investigations had led him to suspect involvement in the Dishonourables’ organisation, he’d marked the file with a big red capital letter S. Others were labelled with a black capital C for ‘confirmed’. Whatever its status, each dossier bore the individual’s service number and, more importantly for Ben’s purposes, a photocopy or scan printout of their official military ID photo.