As she approached the door, Kelly fumbled in her handbag for her house keys, then frowned as she realised Jamie had them. She breathed out huffily and, feeling her muscles tense with anticipation of the impending row, turned around.

Jamie was at the end of the little pathway that led up to the front door of her flat. He held the keys up and jingled them as he sashayed towards her. When he was less than a metre away, Kelly tried to grab them, but she was too slow: he jerked his hands out of the way.

‘Just give me the fucking keys, Jamie.’

‘Touchy, touchy…’ he replied.

‘You’re an idiot, Jamie. You could have killed us.’ She made another swipe at the keys; this time Jamie grabbed her wrist. He pushed her up against the door, pressed his body against hers and went in for the kiss. Kelly turned her head to one side to make her lips inaccessible. She wasn’t the type to snog in public any more than she was the type to argue. ‘Just open the bloody door,’ she hissed. ‘It’s freezing.’

They tumbled inside. Kelly stopped to pick up her mail – what looked like a gas bill nestled among a flurry of pizza delivery leaflets – while Jamie opened the main door to the flat, looking for all the world like he owned the place. It wound Kelly up even more – she’d only been seeing the guy for six weeks and he was practically living there, eating her food and channel hopping her television with his feet up on the coffee table. He said he had his own place, but Kelly had never seen it and was beginning to wonder.

‘That’s the last time you use my car,’ she stated as she slammed the door shut, more to make it clear that she was still pissed off than anything else. Jamie was helping himself to a beer from the fridge in the kitchenette area that formed part of the main room. She noticed that the surfaces were considerably less tidy than they had been when she left for work that morning. Jamie had clearly been there for most of the day and hadn’t bothered to do much cleaning up after him. Kelly put her large, fashionable handbag down on the cheap blue sofa and turned to face him. ‘I said, that’s the last time you use my car, Jamie. I’m sick of you driving it like bloody Lewis Hamilton.’

Jamie took a pull from his beer. ‘Thought you liked me picking you up from work.’

Kelly bristled. Now was hardly the time to admit it, but she did like the way the other secretaries at the law firm where she worked would congregate not very subtly in the foyer whenever she happened to mention that Jamie was meeting her at home time. He was several years younger than her – than any of them, in fact – and was, by all appearances, a Good Catch. Of course, she had kept quiet about the down side of being with Jamie: the constant sponging. Kelly even found that she would fool herself, whenever her purse was light, that it was down to her own scattiness. But Kelly wasn’t scatty by nature. She was methodical and thrifty. If she thought there were two twenty-pound notes in her purse, there should be two. Not one. Deep down she knew that, but she chose to ignore it. She chose to ignore, too, the time when she had searched through his jacket while he was in the bath. Kelly’s intention had been to flick through the messages on his mobile phone, but instead she had found something else: a thick wad of notes – two or three hundred pounds by the look of it. A lot of money for a young man who was ‘between jobs’.

‘Anyway,’ Jamie continued as he walked louchely up to her, ‘what would you rather be doing? Putting on a nice pair of slippers like all those other boring old cows you work with?’ He hooked his free arm around her waist and lightly kissed her neck. ‘Watching Gardener’s World?’ He said it in a mock high-pitched voice that made Kelly smile despite herself.

‘No,’ she breathed, her voice still a bit surly. And then, ‘You just scared me, Jamie.’

‘Don’t you like being scared?’ he asked.

He kissed her on the neck once more. This time it sent a little shiver of pleasure down her spine. Her boyfriend pulled away, then looked at her with an obviously fake little-boy-lost look. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said with an irresistible half smile. ‘I’ll never do it again.’

‘Liar,’ she whispered.

And then he kissed her again, on the lips this time as his free hand formed an arc around the curve of her buttocks. It was a serious kind of kiss and she could not help but close her eyes. Her tense body became softer, more compliant. Though their mouths were still locked in a kiss, she heard herself gasp.

Jamie was far from gentle as he removed her clothes, but for some reason she didn’t mind that. It took almost no time at all for her trouser suit, blouse and underwear to be relegated to a crumpled pile on the floor. She kept her fashionable glasses on, as well as her bead necklace, because she knew he liked that.

Jamie took a step back and surveyed Kelly’s body. It flashed through her mind that she had gone from utter fury to absolute desire in minutes; a small corner of her brain wondered how Jamie had done that, or what she should think of herself for being so easy. But she didn’t really care that much. She liked the way her young lover looked at her. She liked being desired. She liked the way she could now pretend to be in control.

She gave him a steady, cool stare, then turned and walked into the bedroom, making very sure to sway her naked hips seductively as she went.

An unmarked white minibus stopped at the entrance to RAF Credenhill. The MOD policeman on duty spoke briefly with the driver, glanced into the vehicle, then nodded and allowed the barrier to open. The bus drove into SAS headquarters and came to a halt. Eight men spilled out.

They crossed the courtyard to the main building, each of them carrying a heavy bergen and walking with the slow gait of soldiers who had been in the field for a long time. Their calves were beasted, their clothes baggy from the muscle mass they had lost on op. Sam Redman was at the back of that little group, his friend Mac alongside him. Both men had deep tans, their skin weathered by several weeks of harsh sunshine. Their beards were bushy – almost comically so – and Sam was looking forward to shaving his off. They’d had twelve hours at Bastion, during which time he’d been able to clean up a bit and wolf down a few platefuls of nosh – hardly Gordon Ramsay, but better than the biscuits brown and Panda Colas they got with their ration packs. Now he needed scalding hot water, rough soap and a proper fry-up from his favourite greasy spoon in Hereford. And after that, come evening, a few beers. Quite a few. It had been a rough two months.

One of the lads in front of them, a young Cockney boy new to the Regiment, turned his head. ‘Keep up, you two,’ he called. ‘They’ll be pensioning you off if they think you can’t keep up with the young ’uns.’

‘Don’t you ladies worry about us,’ Mac replied quickly. ‘We’ve got all the energy in the world. Just ask your mum. It were only last week we were taking turns giving her a Bombay Roll. Gave her a right good fucking seeing to. Tell her I said hello, won’t you?’

A few of the guys laughed. Mac just looked at Sam and rolled his eyes before looking around at the bleak, utilitarian surroundings of Credenhill. After the bright blue skies, golden desert and lush vegetation of Afghanistan, it was drab and grey, this featureless compound under a Tupperware sky. ‘Nice to be home,’ he observed without a trace of sarcasm.

‘Too right,’ Sam replied. Unlovely though it was, it was a hell of a sight better than being in the green zone of Helmand Province, not having to worry about some black-robed, bearded bastard taking potshots at you or your mates. ‘Too damn right,’ he repeated.

An hour later, Sam had finished the process of dumping his kit in his single-bunked room and checking his weapons back in. There were no messages for him in the squadron office and he was looking forward to getting to the ground-floor flat on the outskirts of Hereford that he called home. Passing through the mess room, however, he saw Mac again. Unlike Sam, Mac was already cleaned up and shaved. Like many of the troopers they’d just returned with, Mac was bunking down at Credenhill. For the rookies it was because they were relatively new to the Regiment and had not yet bought themselves a place in the town; for Mac it was because his missus had kicked him out of the house for the umpteenth time. Some indiscretion with a Regiment groupie, no doubt – Sam had long since given up asking.