‘Of course, excellent – what’s my day?’

‘On your desk, waiting for you. Oh, the Captain rang on his mobile, took the dog walking off camp, lost it – his story…’

He’d unlocked his door.

‘Don’t take your coat in there, Major, get wet all over your carpet. I’ll take it outside and shake it.’

‘Would you? Thank you.’

‘Dogs are as bright as their masters, if you ask me – give us the coat.’

She’d been beside him, reaching up and helping him off with it, tutting criticism because it dripped a stain on the carpet, and she was gone.. Other than his sister, Corporal Barnes was the only woman he knew. Only went to his sister, the cottage near the water at Ambleside, for his three weeks’ leave a year, but he was with Corporal Barnes for the other forty-nine. Four years she’d been with him – didn’t know where she went for her leave, never asked, assumed she went back to her mother. No one could say it was against her wishes, but he’d quietly put the cap on any question of her promotion to sergeant and he’d blocked any proposal for her transfer. He gazed around his room. Not much that was personal to him, other than the pictures. Leave charts for the section, night-duty rosters, photographs of their new armoured personnel carriers and new mortars and their new minister of defence. The pictures were his own. He was not a happy man, and less happy now that the certain days of the Cold War were consigned to the rubbish bin, and certainly not happy that a working lifetime of deep knowledge was about to be ditched into the same bin.

The pictures represented the happiest time of his life. The Last Stand of the 44th Regiment at Gundamuck was his favourite, the little knot of men gathered round their officer who had tied the colours around his chest, their ammunition exhausted and bayonets their only defence, the tribesmen circling them in the winter snow of the Khyber Pass – good stuff – and The Remnants of an Army, Lady Butler’s portrayal of the surgeon’s arrival at Jalalabad a couple of days after the Gundamuck massacre, only chap to get through.