Someone passed a spliff to Brant and he muttered that he’d have to report drugs on the premises before he inhaled enough weed to put a smile on even Edwina Currie’s face.

He patted Roberts on the shoulder, said:

‘Ten and counting, right boss?’

Falls was having a night in, she and Andrews having spent a day doing traffic and nothing, nothing on earth was as tedious as that. It also meant working with traffic wardens, and nobody moaned like those fuckers. Not even the public could rise to the level of whining achieved by wardens.

Andrews had screamed at one:

‘Hey, we’re trying to help you out here, we’re not the goddamn enemy.’

Falls was beginning to like this girl and tried hard not to. You got close to a copper, you got hurt — it was set in stone. But this girl, she had true grit and a low level of tolerance, qualities that Falls loved. The warden tried for sympathy:

‘You don’t know what it’s like to have to do this stuff.’

Andrews looked to Falls who gave her the okay, so she said:

‘And guess what? We don’t want to know. Get a real job, try doing meals on wheels or go on the dole, but primarily, stop bitching.’

Like that.

Days such as those, you wanted to get home, get wasted and shut out the world. Falls had already started. First she had a shower, then put on an old cotton dressing gown with a picture of Garfield on the front. He had a question mark over his head. Falls often wondered what the question was; it never once occurred to her to wonder about the answer.

A bottle of vodka was chilling in the fridge and that’s what she wanted herself, to chill. She was drinking from a bottle of Bud and that couldn’t seriously be considered drinking, could it? She liked the habit of drinking from the neck, it was laid-back and showed you were with the game. So, okay, she’d already had three but hell! She was home, and who was counting, anyway?