Valley of Death. Scott Mariani

the ones with a tough-guy attitude, who for some reason didn’t expect a skinny Jamaican kid who was forever smiling and ebullient to be so deadly once he got behind a rifle.

      Ben had warned Tuesday in the past about the showing off. ‘We’re here to teach them, not embarrass them.’ Still, Ferreira’s guys hadn’t taken it too badly. After class the three trainees had driven off to the nearest town, Valognes, in search of beer and fast food to help soothe their wounded pride and prepare them for another day of humiliation ahead.

      Even Tuesday’s spirits were dampened by the gloomy atmosphere around the kitchen table. But the glumness of the three friends had nothing to do with the tribulations of their work. The theme of the dinnertime conversation had been women troubles. Tuesday, who appeared to enjoy a stress-free and uncomplicated love life largely because he was always between girlfriends, had nothing to complain about. For both Ben and Jeff, however, it was a different story.

      Ben had recently returned from an unexpectedly adventuresome trip to the American Deep South. There, in between dodging bullets and almost getting blown up and eaten by alligators, he’d met and befriended a lady police officer called Jessie Hogan. They had dinner and went to a jazz gig together, and although Jessie made it pretty obvious that she liked Ben, nothing happened between them. Ben drove back to New Orleans and boarded his flight home without so much as a kiss being exchanged.

      But that wasn’t the impression that Ben’s French girlfriend, Sandrine, had formed.

      Ben and Sandrine had been together for a few months. It wasn’t love’s young dream. Both of them had been hurt before, and it had been a somewhat cautious, reticent start to the relationship before they fell into a comfortable routine. She was a head surgeon at the hospital in Cherbourg, some kilometres away, whose punishing work schedule meant she didn’t live at Le Val and only visited now and then. It had been on one such visit, a couple of days ago, when the two of them had been hanging out in the prefabricated office building and Ben had needed to step outside for a few minutes to attend to a delivery of some items for the range complex.

      While his back was turned, as luck would have it, an email had landed on his screen: Jessie Hogan, saying what a great time she’d had with him and expressing a strong desire to see him again if he happened to swing by Clovis Parish, Louisiana any time in the future. She’d signed off with a lot of kisses.

      Sandrine hadn’t taken it too well. Ben had stepped back inside the office to be met with tears and anger. ‘So this is what you get up to on your travels, is it?’

      Calmly at first, Ben had protested his innocence. But nothing he could say could persuade her, and after a bitter quarrel and a lot of accusations, Sandrine had driven off in a rage. It was Jeff who’d stopped Ben from going after her. Jeff had been right: following a row with a car chase wasn’t such a good idea.

      Ben hadn’t been able to get through to Sandrine on the phone since, and she wasn’t responding to emails. He’d decided to give it a few days and drive up to Cherbourg. But it wasn’t looking good, and her allegations of infidelity had shaken him to the core. It would never have occurred to him not to trust her, if the situation had been reversed. Maybe he was just naïve when it came to these matters.

      ‘Women,’ Jeff said with a snort. His glass was empty again. He motioned for the bottle. Ben slid it across the table, and Jeff grabbed it and topped himself up, clearly intent on polishing off the whole lot before uncorking another. Tuesday rolled his eyes.

      ‘Come on, mate, it’s not that bad.’

      ‘Isn’t it?’

      Jeff’s whirlwind love affair with a pretty young primary school teacher called Chantal Mercier had come as a surprise to his friends at the time. The rugged, rough-around-the edges ex-Special Boat Service commando seemed like the last kind of guy a woman like Chantal would go for. To Ben’s even greater amazement, not long afterwards Jeff had announced that he and Chantal were getting engaged. It all seemed to be going full steam ahead. The wedding date was set for later in the year, at the nearby village church in Saint Acaire. Jeff had even been trying to learn French.

      But while Ben was in America, a long-simmering dispute between Jeff and his fiancée had finally blown up. Chantal could live with her future husband’s military past but couldn’t tolerate that he made his living by teaching people how to, in her words, ‘kill people’. After much soul-searching, she’d come to the conclusion that she couldn’t reconcile his violent and morally corrupt profession with her calling as a teacher of innocent, vulnerable little children. Chantal would have no truck with Jeff’s explanations that Le Val was a training facility devoted to teaching the good guys how to protect innocent people from the bad guys, and that all the firearms at the compound were kept strictly secure in an armoured vault, and that the place was about as morally corrupt as a Quaker convention. Adamant, she’d given him an ultimatum: if he wouldn’t give up his position at Le Val and let his partner take over his share in the business, then he could wave goodbye to the future he and she had planned together.

      Jeff had flatly refused to quit. Whereupon, true to her promise, Chantal had broken off the engagement. The dramatic collapse of their relationship had floored Jeff, and he was still extremely bitter about it. He talked about little else – and Ben got the feeling he was about to start talking about it again now.

      ‘She knew what I did when we got together,’ Jeff groaned, staring into his glass. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with her? Don’t answer that, I already know.’

      Tuesday looked at Jeff with wide eyes. ‘You do?’

      ‘Damn right I do. She’s a do-gooder, that’s what she is.’ Jeff took another gulp of wine and tipped his glass towards Ben. ‘Just like what’s-her-name. That activist chick Jude runs around with.’

      Jude was Ben’s grown-up son from a long-ago relationship, now living in Chicago with his girlfriend. Ben wouldn’t have described her as a ‘chick’, but ‘do-gooder’ was admittedly apt, as was ‘activist’.

      ‘Actually,’ Ben said, ‘things aren’t going too well there either. Jude called last night. Looks like they might be splitting, too.’

      ‘There must be something going around,’ Tuesday said.

      Jeff grunted. ‘He should never have hooked up with her in the first place. Let me guess, she finally realised Jude isn’t enough of a soy boy commie liberal for her tastes.’

      Jeff really wasn’t in a good mood tonight.

      Ben said, ‘Not exactly. She’s become a vegan.’

      ‘Oh, please. Give me a break.’

      ‘And apparently she expects Jude to follow suit.’

      ‘What, like, and live on rice and egg noodles?’

      ‘Can’t have egg noodles,’ Tuesday said.

      ‘Why not?’ Jeff asked him.

      ‘Got egg in them,’ Tuesday said.

      ‘No kidding. So what?’

      ‘It’s exploitation of chickens. Like honey is exploitation of bees.’

      Jeff shook his head in disgust. ‘Jesus H. Christ. What is it with these food fascists? It’s like a disease. It’s spreading everywhere.’

      ‘Nah,’ Tuesday said. ‘It’s not a disease, it’s psychological. They’re stuck in a developmental phase that Freud called the oral stage. The kid learns as a baby that it can manipulate its parents’ behaviour by refusing to eat this or that. Basically, it grows up as a control freak, having learned at an early age how to get its own way and be the centre of attention all the time. From their teens they start attaching moral or ideological values to justify using food as a weapon.’

      Jeff, whose idea of using food as a weapon was restricted to mess-room grub fights and custard-pie-in-the-face comedy routines, stared at the younger man. Tuesday had a way of coming out with things out of left field, whether it was some obscure quotation, a snippet of poetry or assorted little-known facts.