This hangover was the worst yet. Danny Evans massaged his puffy eyelids like it might work some life back into them. It was a few minutes before midday and he still hadn’t even pulled back the curtains. He didn’t want to. The eruption of light would no doubt agitate his state, but a bigger reason to keep the curtains shut was his refusal to embrace a new day. He didn’t want to move on from last night, he didn’t deserve to.

He had murdered someone.

It felt different. Marcus Olsen had come with a sense of detachment. Someone else had done all of the work. Someone else had got him to the building, someone else had tied him up to fill his mouth with the barrel of a shotgun. Danny could play that one down, strip it back to its basics. All he had done was pull on a strip of metal and even that he had been coerced into doing. He would challenge any father standing in that room, reading that material, to have done anything different.

But last night he had driven for an hour to walk into a building with a weapon in his hand. He had followed instructions and a woman was dead. He wasn’t just a father seeking vengeance, he was a murderer.

He had made it back to his hotel in a daze, even forgetting the horror that he had left on the bed. But the suited man had been as good as his word. His bed looked fresh, there was a whiff of carpet cleaner and the sink was clear.

Still, he had needed to drink his petrol-station liquor to fend off the image of a young woman throwing her palms up at him like she was about to beg for her life. In fact, he had drunk well past that, to the point of slipping unconscious. His first wake-up had been on the floor of the bathroom and from there he had crawled to the foot of the bed to continue his slumber – even in an intoxicated state he still couldn’t bring himself to clamber onto the sheets. Now he felt nausea with every movement. Even moving his eyes caused him discomfort, like he could actually feel the optic nerves working behind them.