He washes a couple of pills down with the last of the liquid and goes to bed, where he finally drifts off right before the alarm sounds, bright and jangling and painful.

TWO DAYS BEFORE

Sorry

Morning. Consciousness unfurling like a sticky tentacle. It takes in my body, the smooth warmth of the sheets; it takes in sound, the hum of the fridge, the cry of seagulls; it takes in that Sabine is no longer here, though I can still smell her perfume on the pillow. It also takes in the fact that I only had one dream where I heard footsteps on the roof and the wail of sirens.

Which overall is a massive improvement. There was a time when I barely slept for weeks on end, days merging into night and back again until I thought it would never end. Those were the months after I’d been put on medical leave, months of emptiness which somehow still managed to be full of angst. Some days I paced round the houseboat for hours on end, unable to leave, unable to make a decision on anything. I thought I was going crazy. And whenever I did finally manage to drift off through sheer exhaustion I’d be treated to a Technicolor mash-up of every dead body and every crime scene I’d ever attended. I remembered details I didn’t even know I knew with startling clarity, and when I checked old crime-scene photos I’d find that, sure enough, my mind wasn’t making this stuff up. I felt the cumulative shock of each murder like sickening body blows, my heart rate constantly high. I lost track of the times I woke up sweating and screaming and shuddering.

It’s ironic that the only thing that helped lessen the frequency and intensity of those episodes is a plant that is only semi-legal. What the tourists don’t realize is that although the selling of cannabis in coffeeshops is tolerated, the supply chain behind it all is still a criminal enterprise. Growing it, curing it and transporting it poses a real risk of prosecution, and it’s only once the package is dropped off at the coffeeshop itself that you’re in the clear. The whole thing is beyond insane. I’d busted enough grow rooms in my time before making inspector on the homicide squad, and it’d been done with a sense of righteousness which now makes me cringe. Many times the grower had claimed it was medicine, believing that their drug was actually helping, not hindering them, a claim I’d dismissed as addicts in denial. Now I wonder how many of them were like me. I marvel at the fact that life has a startling tendency to switch up on you. Or a tendency to be just plain perverse.