When Mary first met Vanessa, she was malnourished and living with her heroin-using mum. Mary had sunglasses on, and the nine-month baby took them off her with glee, chewed at them, and did not want to give them back. Mary let Vanny keep the glasses, which were expensive – Raybans actually – and then wore one three-pound pair each week for the following year.

Those were the moments that made it worthwhile. Looking back, though, Mary was just glad the kid hadn’t choked on the wee pins that hold those glasses together. The job was more fun when she knew nothing – like skiing.

Mary reached the other end of the room, where fourteen criminal-justice workers typed court reports and breach reports, updated risk assessments and popped downstairs every hour to check in a service user. ‘Service user’! Mary referred to her guys as her guys, and they were all guys. The women were now supervised in a holistic and separatist manner in a different building. Mary found it easier to work with men, but had never been tempted to analyse why. In fact, she wouldn’t work with the women, even if you paid her forty K a year.

‘Big night last night?’ Lil was on her second coffee.

‘That obvious?’

‘You’ve put on weight.’

‘I know, right? Nine stone fourteen,’ said Mary.

‘You mean ten stone?’ Lil had said a bad word.

‘It’s the wine. I had three very large glasses at home last night. On my own.’

‘Aw, that’s so sad.’

‘Sad? Are you kidding? Can’t believe I’ve spent all these years getting drunk with other people.’

Lil donned her American movie-trailer voice: ‘One alcoholic parole officer. Four weeks to go. One last client. What could possibly go wrong?’

‘Mary! MARY!’

Fuck, it was the green-haired student social worker, her voice coming from behind. Mary must not look back. See what happens when she forgot to put on her headphones? She must walk with purpose; she must pretend to be deaf; she must get out the door, across the landing, into the meeting room.

Phew.

Serious folk from serious places sat around a serious desk each month to share the kind of information that should’ve been shared about Ian Huntley before he murdered two little girls in Soham. Mary could see the girls’ innocent faces clearly still; like Vanny’s sunglasses, they kept her going. This serious gathering was called the Multi Agency Public Protection Authority, or MAPPA to people with ADS (Acronym Dependency Syndrome). Mary was able to answer fifty percent of the questions posed about her racist prick lifer guy, Simon Gallacher, who’d murdered an Asian kid when he was an angry white kid, which was just before he turned into an angry white man. Gallacher’s criminal record listed a violent offence every five years, most of them racially aggravated. Mary hated his guts and left the meeting with fourteen actions to be completed ASAP. For example: