Mitsubishi Shogun for the drive out here. Mid-afternoon, and it was hot enough to need all the windows wound down, even up here in the hill country near Campo Basso. Ben gazed around him at the scenery as the car lurched along the rutted, rocky track.
Beyond a stand of trees, the little farmhouse came into view. It was pretty much exactly what he’d expected, a simple and neat whitewashed block with shutters and a wooden veranda, red terracotta tiles on the roof. Behind the house stood a cluster of well-kept outbuildings, and beyond those was a sweep of fields. Sunlight glittered off a long row of greenhouses in the distance.
Ben pulled up, killed the engine and stepped down from the dusty Shogun. The chickens scratching about the yard parted hurriedly as a Doberman came trotting over to investigate the visitor. From somewhere round the back, Ben heard a woman’s voice call the dog’s name. It paused a second to eye him up, then seemed to decide he wasn’t a threat and went bounding back towards the house.
The front door opened, and a tall man in jeans and a loose-fitting khaki shirt stepped out onto the veranda. His gaze landed on Ben and the moustached face cracked into a grin.
‘Hello, Boonzie,’ Ben said, and he was transported back nearly seventeen years to the day they’d first met. The day a young soldier had turned up at Hereford with over a hundred other hopefuls dreaming of wearing the coveted winged dagger badge of the most elite outfit in the British army. The wiry Glaswegian sergeant had been one of the stern, grim-faced officers whose job it was to put the fledglings through unimaginable hell. By the time the selection process had done its worst and Ben had been one of just eight tired, bruised survivors, his gruff, granite-faced tormentor had become his mentor, and a friend for life. The Scotsman had been there, grinning like a proud father, when Ben had been awarded his badge. And he’d been there, calm and steady and dependable, when Ben had experienced his first serious battle.
They’d served together in the field for three years, before Boonzie had moved on to training recruits full-time. Ben had sorely missed him.
It had been four years after that, Ben now an SAS major stationed in Afghanistan, when he’d heard the unlikely rumours: that mad Scots bastard McCulloch had cracked. Gone soft in the head, found love, quit the army and set up home in the south of Italy, milking goats and growing crops. It had seemed bizarre.
But now, looking around him and seeing his old friend walking down the steps of the house with a warm grin and the sun on his tanned, creased face, Ben understood perfectly what had drawn Boonzie here.
The man hadn’t changed a great deal physically over the years. He had to be fifty-eight or fifty-nine now, a little more grizzled but still as lean and wiry as a junkyard hound, with the same work-toughened look of a man who’d spent most of his life doing things the hard way. Something inside had softened, though. Those hard grey eyes had a diamond twinkle to them now.
‘It’s grand to see ye again, Ben.’ Boonzie was one of those Scots who could go the rest of his life without ever returning to the old country but would go on wearing his accent proudly like a flag until the day he died.
‘You look good, Boonzie. I can see you’re happy here.’
‘You wouldn’t have believed this dour auld fucker could find true bliss, would you?’
‘When did I ever call you a dour old fucker?’
Boonzie’s grin widened an inch. ‘What brings you all the way out here, Ben? You didn’t say much on the phone. Just that you wanted to talk to me about something.’
Ben nodded. He’d wanted this to be face to face. ‘Here, come in out of the sun.’
The house was as simple inside as it was out, but it was homely and inviting. As Boonzie ushered him through to a sitting room, a door opened and Ben turned to see a deeply tanned Italian woman walking into the room. She stood only chest-high to Boonzie, who put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed her affectionately to his side. The smile she flashed at Ben was broad and generous, like her figure. A mass of curly black hair with just a few silver strands tumbled down onto the shoulders of her blouse.
‘This is my wife Mirella,’ Boonzie said, gazing lovingly down at her.
Ben put out his hand. ‘Piacere, Signora.’
‘I am pleased to meet you too,’ Mirella replied in hesitant English. ‘Please call me Mirella. And I must practise my English, as Archibald only speaks Italian to me now that he has learned.’
Archibald! In all the years in the army together, Ben had never asked what his real name was. Ben shot a glance at Boonzie, who was staring in horror at his wife, and couldn’t resist breaking out into a grin that quickly threatened to spill over into a laugh. ‘You and Archibald have a beautiful home,’ he said.
Boonzie soon got over it. While Mirella returned to the kitchen, strictly forbidding any male to enter until dinner was prepared, Ben had a cold bottle of Peroni beer pressed into his hand and was given the tour of the smallholding.
‘Nine acres,’ Boonzie said grandly, sweeping an arm across his land. ‘Place was just a rocky wasteland when I found it. Not what you’d call a farm, but it keeps us going. The greenhouses are for basil, the rest of it is my tomato crop.’
Ben was no farmer. He shrugged and looked blank. ‘Just basil and tomato?’
‘That’s our wee business,’ Boonzie explained. ‘Mirella’s one hell of a cook. Her secret recipes for basil pesto and tomato sauce are like you wouldn’t believe, old son. I grow the stuff, she cooks it all up and we bottle it. Once a week I go out in the van and do the rounds of the local restaurant trade. Campo Basso, the whole area. It’ll never make us millionaires, but look at this place. It’s heaven, man.’
Ben gazed around him and found it hard to disagree. Running his eye across the neat rows of greenhouses, he noticed a gap between them that was just a rectangle of freshly-dug earth marked out with string. A shovel stood propped against a wheelbarrow, beside it a pile of aluminium framing and glass panels wrapped in plastic, some bags of ready-mix cement and a mixer.
‘New greenhouse,’ Boonzie explained, slurping beer. ‘Can’t build enough of the damn things. Need to finish putting it up.’
‘How about I give you a hand right now?’
It took a lot of persuading, but Boonzie finally relented and ran back to the house to fetch another shovel and more beer to keep them cool while they worked. Ben didn’t wait for him. He rolled up his sleeves, grabbed the shovel and dug in.
As the sun rolled by overhead, the greenhouse gradually took shape and Boonzie reminisced about the old days. ‘Remember that time Cole almost shat himself in the boat?’ he smiled as he bolted together a section of frame.
The legendary episode, retold countless times since, had happened during winter training up in Scotland, not long after Ben had joined 22 SAS. He, Boonzie, and two other guys named Cole and Rowson had found themselves stranded in the middle of a misty Highland loch when the outboard motor on their dinghy had cut out. Drifting through impenetrable curtains of fog, Boonzie in his mischievous way had begun working on unnerving the lads with ripping yarns of the strange, terrible creatures that lurked in the depths. As Cole bent over the motor trying to get it started and muttering irritably at Boonzie to shut up, a black shape had suddenly exploded out of the water right in his face, sending Cole into a screaming panic that almost made him fall overboard. The ‘monster’ had turned out to be a seal.
Ben, Boonzie and Rowson, SAS hard guys draped in weapons, trained to kill, had been so weak with laughter that they’d hardly been able to paddle the damn dinghy back to shore.
Those were the stories you carried in your heart. Not like the darker memories, the tales of dead friends, ravaged battle zones, the horror and futility of war. The things nobody reminisced over.
‘So what was it you wanted to talk to me about?’ Boonzie asked as Ben poured a fresh load of cement into the barrow. ‘You didn’t come all the way here to shovel shite.’
‘Mirella seems like