Confessions of an Undercover Cop

Face down in the gutter

My first dead body showed up on my second day on the streets. It was a cold, crisp early day in January and my tutor, PC Joe Gardiner, walked me along one of the busiest roads in the East End.

Traffic was building up. I took each step with trepidation, remembering the photo albums we’d seen at training school of fatal traffic accidents, murders and accidental deaths. We passed two of my fellow probationers stopping vehicles driving in the bus lane and I wished I could join them.

As we made our way up the main road I saw what looked like a bundle of rags up ahead by the kerbside. I felt giddy. This was it.

A few steps closer.

Another.

I saw it. Him. The body. A tramp. A dead person.

The world was going about its business, ignoring, or not seeing, the man frozen to the ground. PC Gardiner and I stood looking down at him.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Joe said.

I looked at Joe. Looked at the tramp. I felt the weight of my policewoman’s hat on my head. I didn’t know what to do, what to say. I was a fraud. I wasn’t qualified to deal with dead bodies. I wanted to run.

I took a deep breath and crouched down, the hem of my skirt skimming the icy pavement. My stocking-clad legs were cold, as cold as the end of my nose and the tips of my toes in my polished black flat shoes, not yet scuffed by life. Or death.

I leant forward and could hear the sounds of traffic driving by, rattling engines and belching exhaust fumes. I looked at the man’s face. Icy dewdrops had frozen on his white beard. He had frost in his eyebrows and on his eyelashes. A smattering of frosty spider web had settled in his dirty grey hair.

I pulled off my gloves and bent closer to feel for a pulse in his neck. I knew I wouldn’t find one. There was something about his eyes. Glassy, non-seeing, half-open. The death stare.

He was a wizened old tramp with the stench of dirt and stale alcohol that wafted up my nose with my first smell of death. I touched the poor fibre of his clothing. Thin. So very cold. And old. Like his body. He might snap if we moved him. His face was white and purple and I wasn’t sure whether it was bruising or lividity. He was half-curled, almost but not quite foetal.

‘He’s definitely dead,’ I said.

‘You the doctor now, Ash?’ asked Joe.

‘Hmm. No.’ I thought about it. ‘Do we call the doctor? Or do we need an ambulance?’

‘An ambulance is for the living. Does he look like he’s just died? Can we save him? You want to give him the kiss of life?’

I gulped, repulsed, embarrassed. ‘No. No, I don’t think so. But … I’ve never seen a dead body. How can I tell?’

Joe softened his tone. ‘He’s not warm. He’s covered in frost. Okay, that could happen when he’s asleep but there’s no sign of life, no pulse and he looks like he’s been here for some time.’ He waved a gloved finger over the man’s face. ‘He’s long dead.’

Joe called for the divisional surgeon, who wasn’t a surgeon at all but a GP who was on call for the police and the only one who could officially pronounce life extinct. Each district had on-call doctors who worked on a rota basis and topped up their salary working for the police. Today they’re known as Force Medical Examiners, or the FME. Ordinarily, we would call a deceased’s own doctor, but we didn’t know this man, or who his doctor was.

Scenes of Crime Officers (SOCO) only attended suspicious deaths or suicides, as would CID, so the rest was up to us, the uniform shift. I had to draw a sketch plan of where we’d found the body. I made a note of his clothing. We had to search the body and seize anything of value. In this case, there was nothing but small change. No wallet. No identification. Nothing.

Then we had to wait. And wait. And wait. The doctor came and pronounced life extinct, then the undertaker finally came to collect the body to transfer it to the mortuary. There was no point taking him to A&E.

Back at the station, PC Gardiner gave me the sudden death forms that needed completing for the coroner. My Girl Guide skills came in handy when one of the questions asked which direction the body faced. North-west.

‘Fax it to the Coroner’s Office,’ Joe said. ‘And be on standby for the post-mortem.’

Post-mortem. When I’d woken up that morning the last thing on my mind was a post-mortem. I hadn’t thought about dead bodies. My head was full of chasing suspects, catching burglars, sorting out a lovers’ tiff, my own romantic ideals. I’d never imagined I would be picking up a dead tramp by the side of the road.

Two o’clock that afternoon when I should have been clocking off duty, I stood by a metal trolley in the mortuary looking at the naked body of our unknown vagrant, the stench of death firmly entrenched in my nose and in my head. Today, I know that smell anywhere and can magic it up on a whim. You never forget.

The body of a very large man lay on the gurney next to our tramp. He’d been dragged beneath a bus for a hundred yards or more. Most of his skin was missing and the body looked black.

An old lady lay on the third trolley up. She’d had her post-mortem and her chest was stitched up in a ‘y’ shape. She was waiting to be put into the fridge before being taken to the undertaker.

If all of this shocked me, I wasn’t prepared for the post-mortem itself. I didn’t faint, I wasn’t sick, but it was unlike anything I’d anticipated. It’s not nice, not pleasant, but it is fascinating. And for the sake of the queasy, I’m not going to detail it.

Our tramp had frozen to death. Hypothermia. Such a sad way to die, lonely and cold and hungry. His last meal had been some chips about twelve hours before he’d been found.

I did cry a tear for him when our efforts to find out who he was failed. His fingerprints were not on the system and he wasn’t known to police. He wasn’t a regular vagrant around our area, so we sent a headshot to all the stations in central London. They failed to recognise him too, even though he’d obviously lived on the streets for some time. We checked and re-checked missing persons records to no avail. The local paper published his photograph and wrote an article about how he was found but still nobody came forward to claim him. Six months later, the council informed us he’d be given a pauper’s funeral.

Who was he and where was his family? What had he done with his life? How and why had he ended up on the streets? When had he given up? Why? All of these questions remain unanswered. My first dead body: John Doe.

Nobody ever claimed him but I will always remember him.

Have you told her?

One of the most difficult and heart-rending jobs of a police officer is to tell someone a loved one has died. Like most jobs nobody wanted, the task of delivering a death message was given to the women or the rookies and for a time I was both. I was given them all. I hated it and often had to fight back tears as I gave the terrible news. I would rather have dealt with the actual death than have to inform the relatives. I’m the sort of person who cries at a stranger’s funeral.

As soon as I came on duty one night, PC Jim McBean and I were sent to a house to pass on some bad news. We stood outside the door and I knocked twice. There was no answer but someone was at home because the television was flickering through the net curtains.

Jim rapped on the window.

A blonde woman pulled back the curtain. She was holding a crying baby and looked frazzled. She waved at us, indicating she would come to the door.

When she clicked off the latch and pulled the door open, my radio burst alive. ‘Ash, have you told that woman her husband’s dead?’

Not the way to deliver a death message.

Do not pass Go

If someone says don’t look, you automatically get the urge to do just that, especially when it’s a mangled car wreck.

There was a fatal accident at the bottom of a very busy junction, on the corner where a street market began. Shops and a pub and a betting shop lined the parade. One of those heavy super-armoured vans that are used to convey money had taken out a blue Volvo estate.

I was instructed to make sure nobody went past the police tape. After six hours, I was weary.

‘But I live down there!’ said an old man.

‘Sorry. You’ll have to wait,’ I said.

‘I only want to go a hundred yards,’ said a man with a dog.

‘Sorry. You’ll have to wait.’

A woman with shopping bags approached. ‘I have to collect something before the supermarket shuts.’

‘Sorry. You’ll have to wait.’

And so it carried on. I deflected all the pleas and fended off those who’d come to gawp. It was tricky as the van was laden with cash and it had to be gathered up and accounted for.

An irate woman approached and wouldn’t accept that she wasn’t going through. She was insistent, persistent and annoying.

My legs were aching, I was desperate for the loo, the forensic examination would be another few hours, and the PC assigned to take over from me hadn’t turned up. I was grumpy and I wanted to go home.

‘I don’t care if you’re the Queen of England, you ain’t going down that road!’ I rationalised it was human nature to lose it, all things considered. ‘A man has been killed in that car this afternoon.’

She dropped her handbag and fell to the floor. She screamed and held her head in her hands and howled, oh how she howled.

I shouldn’t have spoken to her like that. It was no excuse that I hadn’t known it was her husband’s car. I had just delivered the cruellest of death messages.

Gruesome twosome

They called us the Gruesome Twosome, my future husband and I. I suppose that’s why we paired up. It put everyone else off. Whenever we were posted together, we ended up with a cartload of bodies, often the arrested kind but frequently the dead.

Kenny was one of those policemen who knew everyone and everything, with a mind like an encyclopaedia. Or the internet, had we had such a thing when I was a lass. He was a walking intelligence unit. People would ring him at home for a snippet of information because Kenny always knew everything about everything.

Kenny was married when I first met him. He was quite a few years older than me and far more mature. I was a young girl. A slip of a thing, as people used to say. He was attractive, I supposed, but I never looked at him in that way. There was never any suggestion of us getting together. He was happily married and I knew his wife. I always thought he’d make a great dad because he was so good with us probationers, as well as everyone else. He was the sort of policeman that you’d want with you when your back was up against it or you were knee deep in the cack. And he could talk his way out of most situations, too. People responded to him well. Perhaps it was that good old cockney way of his that he had honed to perfection. And I don’t mean the likes of those you find on EastEnders. He was just an all-round good guy who treated people decently, whoever or whatever they were.

The first dead body we dealt with together was an old man, Mr George Chapman. He’d sat down in front of his television and died, his dog by his side. A neighbour who could see the man in his basement flat noticed he hadn’t moved in between the hours of him going to work and coming back. The neighbour had a key but called the police before using it.

I was on foot patrol on my own and given the job. When I arrived, the neighbour let us into the flat. I naively said him, ‘Have you seen a dead body before?

‘I was in the war, love. I’ve seen my fair share, don’t worry,’ he said, with a wink.

I felt stupid but it was a lesson learned and although I’d already dealt with a few sudden deaths I was disconcerted to see Mr Chapman sitting there with his eyes half open, seeming to look at me wherever I moved in the room.

I called all the people I needed to call and I took a statement from the neighbour. Then I called for a unit to come and collect the dog. He’d have to go into kennels until we found the next of kin of Mr Chapman.

Kenny came to the rescue. He’d been posted to a panda and agreed to pick up the pet. ‘Don’t forget to search the house, Ash. Old people are notorious for stashing money away. The local burglars get wind he’s died, they’ll be in looking for it.’

I knew old folk did that because my granddad had done the same. Kenny left with the dog. I waited for the doctor and the undertaker to come and set about searching the bedroom, away from the half-open eyes. First stop, the bed. Cliché, yes, but there it was: a stash of fivers and ten-pound notes. I gulped. I collected it all up and looked in the bedside cabinet drawer. Apart from some loose change there was nothing of note. Then I looked in the wardrobe. It was one of those old-fashioned polished wood, curve-fronted pieces of furniture that were beautifully designed but out of favour. Just like the one my granddad had. On the shelf with the pile of old underwear was an envelope containing fivers. I checked the pockets of all the jackets and found more money. I called Kenny on the radio.

‘When you’ve got a minute could you come back please?’ I asked. ‘And bring some property bags.’

‘Aah,’ he said. ‘You’ve found what I was talking about then?’

‘Umm. Just a bit.’

Kenny took it all in his stride. He checked the places I’d checked and then we searched some more. We counted it all up and it came to a few thousand quid.

‘The neighbour who called it in can witness we’ve taken it. Any luck with next of kin?’

‘I’ve got an address book. The neighbour said Mr Chapman had a couple of nieces who sometimes visit but he doesn’t know where they live. I thought I’d ring some of the numbers in his book when I got back to the nick.’

‘Good thinking,’ said Kenny. He went off to get the neighbour while I transferred all the money to the kitchen table.

We counted £3,225, all in ten- and five-pound notes. We counted it twice. The neighbour acted as a witness and counted it with us. He signed our notebooks to agree it was correct.

On the way back to the station with the money all signed and sealed up, Kenny joked, ‘They’ll have to strip-search us you know. Check we haven’t stolen any.’

I believed him. At first, anyway. He was a joker!

We booked it into Property and the station sergeant came to countersign it. He ripped open the seal and counted out the money. He counted it again. Then again. It was £100 short. What? How? I felt my insides go cold and I felt a little bit sick. I knew I hadn’t taken any. I was confident Kenny hadn’t either. I also doubted the neighbour had. So how?

Kenny checked the adding up on the original notebook entry. We’d written down a list of where each amount was found in the house. He totted up the totals again. The maths was wrong. In adding it up, somehow we’d included an extra hundred. The mistake was there to see.

We had to take the money and the notebook back to the neighbour. He laughed and said, ‘It’s all right. I know youse hadn’t nicked any. I saw you make the mistake but thought I’d got it wrong. That it was my maths. Never my strong point.’ He happily signed our notebook to that effect but I still worried about being questioned and strip-searched.

The next sudden death for me and Kenny took place on a cold and frosty Sunday morning in February. The puddles were iced over and the meagre day had only just begun. With not much else to do at six thirty on a Sabbath morning, we took a walk through an ancient cemetery.

I saw him first. He was sitting on a bench, slouched over a pair of old walking sticks. I suggested we took the other path, to allow the man some privacy.

‘I think we’d better check him out. He looks a bit too cold to me,’ said Kenny.

We approached the figure. Kenny touched the man’s neck. He looked at me and shook his head.

I glanced down and on the path, between the man’s legs, was a pool of congealed blood with a razor blade lying in it. Beside the man, on the bench, lay an unsigned letter.

It revealed his story. He’d visited his wife’s grave and taken a seat on the bench. He had cancer and early dementia. He could no longer go on without his wife. He missed her so much. He was lonely. They didn’t have children. He was an old man on his own and it was time to be with her again.

It was so very sad. I stood in the churchyard and cried. I wasn’t tough. Not then.

Kenny was sympathetic and we dealt with the situation appropriately and respectfully.

A few weeks later, there was the man Kenny had to drag out of the river. I had to deliver the terrible news to the dead man’s family when they came to the station to report him missing.

We had an old lady who had been dead in her bed for a week.

Then the young mum who had an undiagnosed heart complaint.

And there are many others we remember … lest we forget.

Hard-knock life

When that female chief inspector told us on our first day at training school that many of us would be injured on duty, I remember my throat constricting and my head giving a little wobble. I was clumsy and knew I could do myself an injury on my own without any help from anyone or anywhere else. I didn’t like violence. I hated confrontation. Was I sure I was in the right job?

Yes. I loved it. All of it. Even when it was bad.

Black and white

I’ve policed many football matches when the Premier League was known as the First Division, and policed various marches and demos, but none so scary as my first, the Wapping dispute in 1986.

Two of the important roles of a police officer are to protect life and protect property. Whenever there are large demonstrations, marches and protests, it’s everybody to the helm. Days off are cancelled, operational tasks rearranged, and whatever his or her regular posting, every officer needs to have a uniform ready for when duty calls.

The blistering, bubbling air was heady, heavy, as the capital prepared. In the bitter night, London waited. The festering pit of strikers, policemen and rubberneckers were gathering and sharp cracks of anticipation were interspersed with tingles of fear. The normally quiet streets of east London were like a boil about to burst.

Tired green battle-buses trawled through the streets as tetchy crowds swarmed on both sides of the metal barriers guarding News International. The cavalry arrived on glossy-coated beasts, many hands high and emblazoned with Metropolitan Police regalia. They incited fervour as they stomped and snorted excitement and fear, while their lord-like riders tried to still the rearing hooves. Fresh manure permeated the air, filling flared nostrils. Discordant horns and hooters joined the cacophony: sounds and smells of conflict.

Quiet chat grew to a low chant: ‘Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs.’

Keeping up the rear, dog-handlers struggled to keep anxious Alsatians in the back of their battered vans until the order for release came. It would, without doubt, come soon. Every animal instinctively sensed distress and unrest. Scurrying rats had long deserted their familiar streets and riotous disturbance chased foxes from urban undergrowth. Howls echoed in the night, as Man became Beast.

Like the last night of carnival, alive and electrifying, agitated tension filled the air as both sides prepared, the big wheel of misfortune turning. Hook-a-duck; hook-a-pig.

Politics had become lost, had nothing to do with the violence that converted convoluted words into an excuse for those wanting, waiting to fight. Genuine strikers, honest police officers and hearty politicians had no place in Wapping on 15 February 1986.

I was but a girl, naive and inexperienced, wearing a uniform tunic and skirt of heavy serge, with thin tights clinging to my legs because there were no trousers for women officers. Not then. My meagre arsenal comprised a handbag, a whistle and a little wooden truncheon, far smaller than those issued to the policemen. My new hard bowler hat had recently replaced the soft black and white peaked caps and I was thankful for that, at least.

Mike Bruce, my sergeant, must have seen my anxiety.

‘We’re the enemy, whether we like it or not. It’s nothing personal,’ he said, squeezing my hand. ‘It was like this up the mines. Just stay close to me, Ash.’

I knew all about the mines. I’d lived in a town bordered by a dozen working pits. In 1984 I’d given 10 per cent of my factory wage to the families of the strikers because that’s what those who were fortunate enough to be working did. The poverty of the proud pitmen, the despair of their conscientious wives, their children’s hungry faces – they flashed back as the baying crowd chanted venom into my face.