When Mary decided to get her diploma, she believed it would be her role to stand on bridges and stop people jumping off. Very soon after qualifying she realised she would never stand on bridges. She and everyone else were too busy catching casualties downstream. Except for sex offenders. If you saw a drowning sex offender being swept with the current you threw a large rock at him. Mary had done her best work in her first five years in the job. Those early cases were the ones she could recall, where she’d made the time and had an impact. She should have been forced to resign at the five-year mark. Every worker should.

Jimmy spent most of his life in an armchair surrounded by photos of Hilda, who looked like a burst couch, in Mary’s opinion, but Jimmy thought she was wonderful now she was dead, and he cried if you mentioned her name. It’s not like Jimmy could’ve done any better than Huge Hilda: what with his skin condition and relentless child-abusing. A wedding photo balanced precariously on a small table beside his armchair, in case the guilt skipped Jimmy’s mind for a moment. He was still in his bedroom, so Mary checked his mobile and TV history, yelling through to let him know that’s what she was doing. Every week another complex task was added to her job description, the latest being that she had to check the devices of her sex offenders. If she found anything dodgy, or if they’d deleted their search history, she would need to respond in a manner befitting a sudden increase in risk. But in a technology battle against an internet sex offender, Mary knew she’d have no chance of being remotely competent. She couldn’t even figure out how to use voicemail on her work-issue Blackberry.

Jimmy and his Zimmer came back into the lounge, wearing the shorts that hadn’t hidden his bits last visit. Mary swiped and tapped and nodded and pressed as if she had a BSc in computer science and a masters in the dark-or-deep net-or-web. With a raised brow, she focused on the first line of Jimmy’s only recent Yahoo email, then on the last line, then on the first again, deducing with confidence and out loud that Jimmy should take a meter reading, for npower, by Friday if possible.

To regain power, Mary looked round the room for another device. She didn’t even need a warrant, fucker. She spotted a black plastic box with holes and shit in it beneath the radiator. ‘Pass me that please, Jimmy.’

Apparently, it was a blow heater. ‘These are expensive, are they not? You should get a combi boiler system. There are grants, I think.’

Jimmy nodded as if to say: Indeed, I am guilty of tossing my PIP money to the wind. Then he put the non-device extravagance back in its creepy little place beneath the radiator.