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the morning is an unavoidable mistake. Mark pukes most of the night up into the sink in the kitchen. As he sticks his fingers down his throat, and is sick, and then uses his fingers to push the chunks of his stomach lining through the gaps in the plughole, he looks out the window. The view is just the same, as if nothing has changed.

He gets Maisie to school. The bile in his stomach swells and laps at the raw lining of his guts, as if he is at sea. After dropping her off and gently, so so gently, prising her fingers away as she cluctches to his leg, he drives to work. For a second he sits in the car after the engine is off. It ticks and hisses and cracks but then cools. He thinks about sleeping in the back seat, and he thinks about the whisky under the driver's and he thinks of Madeline Peyroux singing

"drink up baby, stay up all night, things you could do, you won't but you might"

And he goes to work.

There is a daily briefing at 9.15, he has eight minutes. He retches into the most discreet toilet, sticking his fingers down his throat until he is happy that there is no sick left in him. If he feels himself starting to hurl in the briefing room, he can at least be content that nothing can come out. He flushes the toilet. The flush is like cheap ocean spray in his face. He feels better for a moment. He crouches like a dog on his haunches. The hot flush from the sick comes and goes, the sweat on his hairy back dries against his shirt.

He stands up. OK.

In the meeting room, the mood is of ostentatious professionalism. Men and women in suits with laptops jostle for the chairs around the big table. Jones is too late, he'll have to stand at the back. He rests his back against the wall. Its ok.

DS Rawlings comes in, looks around and says:

"Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Right, three shootings last night, two are gang related the third was outside an off licence in Withington. Apparently some drunks fought with the robber and one of them got shot in the leg. NLT" (he means "not life threatening".

"Two domestics, one in Bury but we'll have to cover that because they're fucking useless. OK". He then spends ten minutes dividing the teams up. No one really wants to work on the gang shootings because they have a special team for that who are all bastards to work with. Jones is hoping not to get the Bury murder. He'll play the childcare card.

He's not assigned anything, which is not an indictment on his failures. He hopes to spend the day on his hangover and paperwork.

"got a minute" says DS Rawlings half an hour later.