swiped the trackpad with a long-nailed forefinger. The video restarted and Mr Ashe watched it all through again.
Time code 00:00: nothing but Lancing Way. No cars parked on either side, the pavements lined with temporary barriers indicating that roadworks were to take place soon.
01:20: a man walks towards the camera with a black Labrador on a lead.
05:26: a harassed mother ushers two children along the pavement in the opposite direction.
08:41: a black Land Rover Discovery trundles slowly along the street towards the camera. It stops about fifty metres away in the middle of the road. The driver climbs out and opens the rear passenger door. A second man appears. He is wearing jeans and a hooded grey top, and has a black North Face bag slung over his right shoulder. He is half a head taller than the driver and has an unkempt black beard. Even with this low-quality footage, Mr Ashe can make out the dark rings around his eyes, and he observes the heavy slump in the man’s gait as he squeezes between two of the roadworks barriers separating the road from the pavement. The driver watches him go. When it becomes clear that he’s not going to get any acknowledgement from his passenger, he shrugs, climbs back into the Discovery and drives off out of view.
08:44: the bearded passenger stops outside one of the houses. It has a neatly trimmed hedge at the front. He stares at the house for a minute before walking up to the front door and ringing the bell. Almost a minute passes.
08:45: the door opens. Mr Ashe cannot see who is there, but he can sense the awkwardness as he or she stands back to let this bearded man enter. The door closes, and now the only thing moving on the screen is the time code, ticking down to the end of the video.
A knock on the door. ‘Do come in,’ he said for the second time.
It was Narinder.
‘They’re ready, Mr Ashe.’
Mr Ashe smiled. ‘Do come in, all of you,’ he said. With a last glance at the screen, he shut the lid of the laptop, then looked up at his three young recruits. They seemed nervous, but eager to do well.
Just the men for the job.
SEVEN
The duty driver who drove Joe to Hereford had offered him a seat in the front. Joe had preferred to sit alone in the back of the black Discovery. That way it was easier not to talk.
Bagram one day. Brize Norton the next. It was enough to fuck with anyone’s head. The sun had been rising over the English countryside as they came in to land. After nearly six months of seeing nothing but the yellows and browns of the desert, the green fields were almost blindingly intense. Joe supposed he should welcome them. For some reason, he didn’t. Now, though, clouds had rolled in and there was a chill in the air. A typical English May morning.
He was standing on the ordinary pavement of this ordinary street. An empty street. No Humvees or MRAPS, nor even any Astras or Fiestas, their absence explained by a sign pinned to a lamppost: ‘4–6 May, roadworks, no parking’. Joe stood on the pavement for a full minute, listening to the silence. It was something he had barely heard for months. In the Stan there was always the noise of a vehicle, or an artillery shell, or some squaddie shouting at his mates. He became aware of a tawny cat sitting on the pavement five metres away, staring at him with pale yellow eyes, and he remembered the lame cat that had limped over the minefield the previous day. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he muttered as he pushed that picture from his mind, hitched his bag further up his shoulder and stepped in the direction of his own front door.
Number 38 Lancing Way was a tiny two-bedroom terraced house, just big enough for Joe, his girlfriend Caitlin and their boy, Conor. Caitlin and Joe had met in Northern Ireland back in 1995, when he was a newbie to the Regiment and she was a local girl serving beers at Daft Eddy’s on Strangford Lough. What they’d both assumed would be a no-strings-attached Sunday-afternoon shag had turned into something more permanent, and Joe had got to know pretty well the route from the Regiment base at Aldergrove to the flat Caitlin shared with two other girls in central Belfast. He’d never told her that he’d run police checks on all three of them before seeing her for a second time. What she didn’t know couldn’t piss her off.
When Joe was recalled to Hereford in the summer of ’97, he’d come clean to Caitlin that he wasn’t really working for British Telecom. She told him she’d politely pretended that she had believed his little deception, and agreed to come with him. They’d shacked up in army accommodation, and while Joe was hoovering up war criminals in the Balkans, or pulling Royal Irish Rangers out of enemy strongholds in Sierra Leone, Caitlin had seemed happy to play house. When she fell pregnant in ’00 – a surprise to both of them – she’d insisted that an army house was no longer good enough. Which was why Joe now found himself here, walking past the neatly maintained front garden, all shrubs and white gravel, and rapping a dirty fist on the red front door.
He saw her approach through the two glass panels: the silhouette of her curly red hair, the gentle slope of her slim shoulders. He saw the way that she hesitated for a few seconds before opening up, doing something to her hair as she prepared to welcome home the man she hadn’t seen for six months.
The door opened. Caitlin’s pretty face was midway between pleasure and nervousness.
‘Hi,’ she whispered.
She wasn’t one for make-up. Her clear, delicately freckled skin had a beautiful, natural glow to it. Today, though, Joe noticed she was wearing lip gloss and mascara. She had on slim jeans and a halterneck top that clung slightly to her small breasts – the kind of clothes she normally wore on a night out, not at ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning. Some of the lads used to tell Joe that she looked like something out of the Corrs; no doubt they said other things behind his back.
‘Hi,’ he replied.
Caitlin stepped back so he could cross the threshold. Only when he had shut the door behind him did she wrap her arms around his neck and give him a brief, awkward hug, before standing back again and brushing her fingertips against the wall. ‘I redecorated,’ she said.
Joe blinked. The walls were powder blue, though what colour they’d been before, he had no idea. ‘Right,’ he replied.
‘Conor’s in his room. I said he didn’t have to go to school…’
Joe glanced up the stairs. His boy was only nine years old. Or was it ten? He realized, in a moment of guilt, that he’d had a birthday in April that Joe hadn’t even acknowledged. Conor was a good kid, at least that’s what his teachers said. Privately, Joe wished he would spend a little less time with his nose in a book, or at a screen playing games. When Joe was Conor’s age, he’d spent every spare hour out of doors, getting muddy, playing imaginary versions of the war games that would become his life. Conor just didn’t seem interested in stuff like that.
‘He’s been looking forward to seeing you,’ Caitlin said.
Joe dropped his bag on the hallway floor. When he looked at Caitlin again, he saw that her eyes were brimming with tears. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
Caitlin wiped the tears from her eyes. She looked angry with herself for crying. ‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘Christ, Caitlin, it’s been a long couple of—’
‘Two months,’ she interrupted, her voice cracking. ‘Two months, Joe.’
‘Since what?’
‘Since I
Silence.
‘Right.’
‘Conor’s been asking every day when he’s going to see his dad. When he didn’t get a birthday letter from you, he asked me if you were…’ The tears had reappeared; she wiped them away again, this time smearing mascara over her stricken face. ‘Sorry… I’m sorry… I wasn’t going to…’
‘I’m going to get cleaned up,’ Joe said. He pushed past her, but then felt her hand grab his wrist.
‘I’ve missed you so much, Joe,’ she whispered. ‘We both have.’ She hugged him again, this time resting her head against his chest. Joe breathed in her perfume and allowed the warmth from her body to saturate his. In his
