Keith's alarm goes off at 6.30 and he hauls himself out of bed as soon as he's awake. The roadworks on Western Road mean it'll take him more than half an hour to get to work and he wants to make an early start on the paperwork that's been cluttering up his desk for almost a week. By the time he showers, dresses, grabs some breakfast and reverses the car out of the drive, the street is starting to stir. The people in the other bungalows are mostly retired, but he has to hand it to them - they've got more energy than people half their age. Good luck to them, Keith thinks, but when he retires he won't lift a finger unless he feels like it. He'll take it nice and slow. Nice and slow.

It wasn't always that way. Sue used to talk about travelling. Keith had planned to breed a few pigeons and do some racing. His old man did the same when Keith was a boy. Now he just dreams of putting his feet up and sinking another beer.

He's at the station by a quarter to eight. He gets a coffee from the machine - it tastes terrible, but it's a habit - and he's at his desk by ten-to. He assumes there's a desk under there somewhere, but there's so much junk he can't be sure. Interview transcripts, charge sheets, permit applications. Is this why he joined the police? To process more paper than a public toilet?

You probably voted for them. Keith did. The law and order ticket, they called it. A guarantee to clean up the streets and make Britain great again. A place you can feel safe. Politicians had been promising that for years, of course, but this time it would be different. They said they'd make people respect the law at all levels of society. Take good care of the window-boxes and the big trees will fall into line, they said. Respect is what's needed. Respect for the law. They explained that they'd slash the defence budget to pay for more police on the streets. They said they'd impose one-strike-and-you're-out controls on gun and knife crime. They promised to reduce drug-related crime to almost zero by legalising cannabis, heroin, coke, crack, the lot... They pumped everyone full of statistics about how legalisation would eliminate the profit margins for drug barons and that would filter down to street level. If someone wanted to mess up their body with that crap, let them. It's their problem.

But what had made Keith really sit up and take notice was when they talked about launching a 'prioritised assault' on corporate fraud. He liked that. Prioritised. He'd worked 22 years for what some of those rich, privileged bastards earned in a month. And the old, corrupt politicians had been just as bad, fiddling their expenses while everyone else was struggling to survive. Anyone who promised to slam their greedy fingers in the till could count on his vote.

And when they got in, they did exactly what they'd vowed to do. It was like a force of nature. The first year saw the biggest fall-off in crime rates since the US abolished Prohibition in the Thirties. It wasn't long before other parts of Europe started to follow suit. And Keith felt good. After Iraq, the swine flu panic, Iran and the Diana scandal, people were looking up to this country again. We were setting an example. Leading the world. Bad things happen, but not in Britain.

It's noon and Keith's barely made a dent in the paperwork. He gets a call about a woman who's been caught sleeping in her bath on one of the estates in Portslade. One of her neighbours had been working on his chimney and he spotted her through the window. Keith visits the man first and he says he's prepared to be a witness, but there needs to be more to make the charge stick. Keith speaks to the suspect and she's fully dressed, shouting about how she doesn't know what the problem is. Keith asks if he can take a look around inside. The bathroom looks clean. Then he lifts up a loose piece of lino in the corner of the room and there's a small pile of dust. Keith asks her how it got there and she breaks down, sobbing. She admits she swept the dust under the carpet because she didn't have time to clean up, what with working all hours and looking after the kids, then she'd fallen asleep in the bath. So Keith arrests her.

He drops her off at the station, then heads over to a barbers in Kemp Town where there's been a report of a disturbance in progress. By the time he gets there a big crowd has gathered outside, pressing against the windows to see what's happening. Keith goes in and by one of the sinks the owner is waving his arms around, arguing with a couple of customers. A police doctor is already on the scene and he explains that the owner had been eating onions for lunch. So Keith arrests him.

At 3pm, Keith is due to meet a former prisoner who's out on parole. Gary was in his class at school. He'd been put away three years ago for driving on a country road near Hassocks after dark and failing to send up a flare every other mile to ensure the road was cleared of livestock. But Keith knows it was a one-off and he's confident he'll go straight from now on... As he approaches the cafe in North Laine he can see that Gary has already arrived and is sitting at a table near the window, shooting up with what he assumes is heroin.

'Hey!' says Keith, as he takes a seat across from him. 'I thought you'd given up.'

'I know, filthy habit,' Gary replies, gesturing to his coffee. 'I started drinking it again in prison.'

They talk about old times. Gary says he's hoping to get a job at Portslade docks, if Keith doesn't mind putting in a good word for him. 'Sure, no problem.' Then Gary asks why he's looking so tired. 'Oh, you know, the job.' He thinks Gary's starting to nod off and not really listening, the way Sue used to do when he tried to talk to her about his work, so he feels safe opening up a little. He's heard it all before countless times in his head, so he's not even sure if he's saying it aloud. About how he hates it that a lot of corporate sharks wriggled free of the net or are involved in legal cases so complex no one will ever be able to disentangle them. About how he never thought he'd know a time when he'd have to arrest someone for sitting in their garden and reading a newspaper on a Sunday, or take in a woman over 50 who hadn't had her teeth capped for starting a conversation with a married man over the age of 20.

Gary lifts his head. 'Well, bad things happen, you know?' He'd heard every word.

'Yeah,' says Keith, getting up. 'But not in Britain.'

He knows he's burying his head in the sand, but what can he do? He can't change it. You've got nothing to worry about if you're honest, they'd said. Yet when the old problems had been solved, they looked for new ones. So they enforced the laws that had been on the statute books for years but ignored. The weird bye-laws you used to read about in the It's A Funny Old World section in the paper.

Now Keith arrests vicars for telling jokes in the pulpit, charges wives for opening their husbands' mail and checks that farmers aren't using elephants to plough their fields. He voted for it. Now he enforces it. Guilty as charged.

He can feel his chest tighten as he accelerates towards home.