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chill in the house, with no sun to warm it up. Hal put his cap on the polished table, which was the only piece of furniture in the room. Kirby, standing in the street outside, coughed and lit a cigarette, and the mukhtar , who was in his fifties perhaps, with dark skin and a moustache, and the voluminous Greek trousers that many of the men in the villages wore, came into the room. ‘Yes?’ he said in English.
    ‘Good morning, sir. My name is Major Treherne.’
    The man nodded. Hal didn’t think he hated him, but he couldn’t tell; it was often hard to tell but it was an important thing to know, to understand how much danger there was. ‘I ask permission to search the village houses for suspected terrorists,’ he said. It was a sentence he used often.
    ‘You’ll do it with or without my permission,’ said the mukhtar , in thickly accented English.
    This was true. If they had intelligence beforehand they skipped the asking of permission.
    ‘If I must,’ said Hal. ‘There are many terrorists who use their families to shield them. I come here as a courtesy to you.’
    There was a silence while the mukhtar looked at him – Hal thought there was every chance he was a terrorist himself. Then, ‘You may,’ he said.

    The soldiers’ searching was methodical and polite, embarrassment rather than belligerence characterising their entry into people’s homes. Hal moved back and forth between the groups. It was so routine as to be tedious, but there was always an undercurrent of tension – at least, it was important to stay sharp. He was only needed if something had been found, or if there was a problem, so when Private Francke came to fetch him, he followed immediately.
    Hal stood in the tiny house and looked at the wreckage.
    The table was on its side. A pool of olive oil moved silently over the floor from a cracked jug. The food cupboard had been emptied and jars shattered. The bedding, which he could see in the back room through the door opening, was tipped onto the ground and the mattresses bayoneted in places. There was china on the floor, too, mostly broken. Hal moved his boot away from a small plate painted with birds and olive branches. ‘I don’t see what you called me in here for, Francke.’
    ‘It’s the empty tins, sir. Who needs that many tins?’
    Hal looked at them. There were ten on the floor near the door into the back room. ‘I can’t arrest somebody for some empty tins. What sort of people are they?’
    ‘Cyps, sir.’
    ‘Yes, Francke – how do they seem to you?’
    ‘Dunno, sir, pretty browned off.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘An old couple, sir.’
    Most of the lads showed an instinctive tact in the dealings they were required to have with the locals, even while calling them wogs and Cyps, but Francke was a bully, and had probably been one all his life. Hal didn’t know the names of all the men in the company; it was the ones who turned up in his office on a charge who stuck in his mind. Francke was one of those.
    ‘Francke.’
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘It seems to me you’ve gone about this with undue relish.’
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘You may have heard the phrase “hearts and minds” bandied about in regard to this campaign.’
    Francke gazed at Hal densely.
    ‘It’s been hard to miss, Francke. It’s been the backbone of what we’re trying to achieve here. This island is under British sovereignty – that means protection as well as rule. We are here to root out terrorism and to protect the population from it, not to give people a grievance and send them scurrying for the hills to grab a bomb with which to murder the next squaddie they see. In other words, this,’ he gestured to the room around him, ‘ is too fucking heavy-handed. Do you understand me? ’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘This is no good .’
    ‘No, sir.’
    Hal sent Francke ahead of him out of the house. He picked up the olive-branch plate and put it on the table and then he went out into the street.

    About fifty villagers had been herded into