Confessions of an Undercover Cop

CONFESSIONS OF AN UNDERCOVER COP

Ash Cameron

For Kenny.

And for our children.

See, we did have a life. Once.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

The end

In the beginning, there was light

Drunk and orderly

Prisoners, property and prostitutes

In your face

A man’s world

Face down in the gutter

Have you told her?

Do not pass Go

Gruesome twosome

Hard-knock life

Black and white

Strapped

Knee-capped

Fitness test

On prescription

No headway

Moving west

All the evidence

The night I met …

Up the junction

Bounty hunting

Nondescript

Wheel clampers notorious

Willy warmers

Cut!

House bugs and other nasty things

Who’s there?

In the crowd

Fast forward

Working the streets

Bit of a handful

Sewer rat

Suspects with benefits

Summary justice

Unmistaken identity

Down the drain

Doors

Dead or alive

The day I met …

Street people

Poisoning pigeons

’Ere!

Expensive jackpot

Keeping up appearances

Marshmallow surprise

The day I almost met …

Marianne St John

Phantom of the theatre

Fast train to London

Pockets

Somebody’s son

Polacc’ed: police car accidents

Swinging low

999 hoax calls

A little bit on fire

Night-duty eyes

On the job

Dead ringer

Perks

Lucky ladders

Downfall

Ailsa MacPhee

A quick buck

B for bingo

Game on

The beano

Busted

Hats off

Ménage à trois

The cost of an arrest

The day I met Jennifer

Exciting boredom

Saving lives

It came off in my hand, sarge

Christmas confession

The call you’re waiting for

Animal lovers

Stanley the Stallion

Dirty Don

Importuning and all that

Daisy chaining

A pounding

Cassie’s girls

Courting

The verdict

Contempt

Through the square window

Let right be done

In stitches

The day Diana died

Women’s work

Mommy dearest

What do you call it?

Double jeopardy

Not their fault

Mum’s gone to Iceland

Mother love

Fly away home

Wearing his ring

Who’s lying?

The man in the corner

Head case

When the Twin Towers fell

Bin-bag kids

Pets at home

For Stan, Santa

Chasing motorcycles

Bad apples

Fair cop, guv’nor

The waiting room

In my head

The end – again

OTS and other strange things

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The end

I was nineteen when I went to London to join the Metropolitan Police. I left the police force twenty years later, combining my leaving do with reaching forty.

They say life begins at forty. Mine didn’t begin but it did change. I look back and wonder: that person, that police officer, was she me?

It’s easy to see why cops feel battered when the people they deal with are often the bad people, the sick of mind people, and the victims and witnesses who are often distressed. And there are those who for whatever reason blame the police for everything.

Police officers can become embittered working in areas of high crime, populated by people with an abhorrent dislike of the law and those who try to enforce it. It’s easy to understand the cynicism and jaded outlook when the days are filled with endless abuse and violence and grief. Even the officers working in the affluent suburbs and the beautiful countryside see people at their worst, all high drama and emotion, because in policing you are rarely involved with people at their best. After all, unless something’s gone wrong, why would you need the police?

It’s a strange phenomenon, and a bit perverse, when a good day at work can be a bad day, a sad day or a tragic day. Saving a life is one of those days.

There are also moments of fun and bizarre absurdity, slivers of sunshine, when you can laugh a real, gutsy belly laugh and know that today is one of the good days. They are golden.

I would have liked to reach the rank of inspector. Beyond that you become a manager, a pusher of pen and paper or mice and emails. Although the higher ranks are necessary, it’s a totally different job. I finished my service as a detective sergeant and I was happy to settle for that, in the end.

Officers higher up the chain of command don’t deal with the public. They deal with police officers and bureaucrats and forget what life is like policing the street. The real gutsy jobs are carried out by those who work hands-on with victims and suspects, getting down and dirty, and there are fewer hands-on officers nowadays, at a time when we need them more and more.

There are lots of opportunities in the police force. I wanted to experience as many as I could. I moved on, did different things, worked in diverse roles with different people in various departments. If I found myself grumbling too much, I knew it was time for change. I believe you make your own future and I’ve never sat around waiting for it to happen.

I’ve worked in the capital, in the East End, the West End, and north London. I’ve worked somewhere in the North too, in a constabulary. I’ve been a uniformed constable, an undercover cop, a detective and a sergeant. I’ve worked with the public in their many guises – victims, witnesses, prostitutes, rent boys, criminals, suspects, and many professionals in multi-agencies. I worked in London at the height of the IRA bombings and dealt with a few too. It’s scary going to work knowing that you might be bombed at any time. As emergency workers, we’d run towards the explosion whilst urging everyone else to run away, and hoping there wasn’t a secondary device primed to go off on our arrival. I’ve worked with the vulnerable, investigated racial incidents, homophobic attacks, elder abuse, missing people; I’ve worked in witness protection, on murder squads, in domestic violence and child protection. I’ve been a volunteer that took underprivileged kids on week-long camps. I’ve helped out in a women’s refuge and come to the aid of Girl Guide and Brownie packs. I’ve saved lives and failed to save others. I’ve done some good things and I’ve also made mistakes, but I’ve always tried my best.

I had a fantastic time and have lots of marvellous memories. I miss the job incredibly, every single day. I loved it. All of it. Even when it was bad, it was good. It was part of me and it always meant more to me than perhaps it should have. It has taken a toll, like it does on every one of us who put everything we have into it. There are threats that still bounce around in my head from time to time, spat out by vile people who I helped to send to prison. I think they’re probably out of jail now, and sometimes I feel them looking over my shoulder.

In the end, I had to make a choice. I could finish the last third of my career on completely restricted duties or take medical retirement due to a physical condition I was diagnosed with. It wasn’t an easy decision and not the way I would have chosen to end my career, but I decided to leave with twenty years’ service when there was a chance to start a different life while my children were young. I gave the job everything I had to give and I still believe the things I believed when I joined. I believe in justice, in right and wrong and, most of all, I still have that desire to help people.

It’s a brave and frightening world out there, but leaving the police force was not the end of my life, even though at the time I wavered and thought it might be. I’ve had some wonderful, exciting and difficult times. When I left, many people asked what I was going to do. All I knew was I intended to take some time out, be a mum, keep my options open and see where life took me. And I wanted to write, because ever since I could I have written stories and there are so many stories in my head.

These are my memories of all those things I’ve mentioned I did, and more. Not all of it is pleasant reading, but then not all of society is pleasant.

I wanted it all and I got a lot. These are my stories, told my way, with names changed to protect the guilty. And the innocent. A colleague might tell them differently.

In the beginning, there was light

All of the new recruits were sent to Hendon Police College. I was young, naive, and full of hope, anticipation and excitement, eager to complete the twenty-week residential course and get out onto the streets.

On the first day we had to swear our allegiance to the Queen. One hundred and sixty of us gathered together in the gym hall that I would come to hate during that twenty weeks.

A female chief inspector spoke, filling our heads with horror, some reality, a few romantic ideals, and a squiggle of ‘What the hell have I done?’

‘Some of you will stick the thirty years. The majority won’t. You’ll love it; you’ll hate it. It won’t always be pretty. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been wounded on duty at least once, so be prepared. You might be injured and it could end your career. You might be shot. Stabbed. Killed. You will get hurt. Get used to it.’

She paused. ‘Some of you won’t make it through training school. Once on the streets you might decide you’ve had enough of being hated by the public, the press, the politicians and the prisoners, for you are nobody’s friend. Remember that.’

My head spun. I looked at her. She was tough. I was soft. How would I cope with being hurt? Being hated? I only wanted people to think the best of me.

‘But you may love it. It’s the best job in the world when you save a life or stop a suicide. When you help people in the most difficult of circumstances. When you find a missing child and reunite him with a distraught family who feared the worst. But don’t forget, you can be a hero one minute and then you’re back out on the streets being pelted with flying bottles and vicious words.’

She looked around the room at the sea of fresh untainted faces in front of her.

‘It’s a good job if you can hack it. Not of all of you will. There are specialist departments to work in like mounted branch, dog section, CID, or undercover, so deep undercover that sometimes you forget who you are. You might decide to go for promotion. Or stay on the beat. Your whole time served might be in one police station, entrenched in a community. The rewards are there if you want them, but watch your back and those of your colleagues because they are the only allies you have.’

Among us were youngsters like me, not much in the way of life experience, starting out keen and vulnerable. There were others who’d decided they wanted a career change and policing had sounded like a good option, with a decent wage, job security and a pension. There were ex-service personnel who’d seen so much more already, and there were graduate entries straight from university.

We stood and listened and wondered why we thought we could do this job. The only dead body I’d seen was a boyfriend’s grandmother in her coffin, but she had been over eighty and it didn’t seem to count.

‘You will come across things you don’t like, things that turn your stomach, deal with offences you didn’t know existed,’ she continued. ‘You will see things you know aren’t right. You will have to decide what to do because when you’re out there, you’re on your own and only you can decide if you can live with the consequences. Only you are responsible for your actions.’

She was done. We filed out feeling like we’d been bollocked, looking anywhere but at each other lest we saw the fear.

In that moment I decided I could, I would do this job. If I survived training school …

Drunk and orderly

It’s a well-known fact that policemen like to drink. It’s one of those clichés found in crime novels and TV dramas. Like most clichés, it exists because there’s a truth in there somewhere.

When I joined the Met, I didn’t drink alcohol. I’d had the odd shandy, a couple of lager tops, a rare lager and lime, but nothing else and certainly no hard stuff. My first hangover was at Hendon Police College. It was my twentieth birthday and a true initiation.

My fellow rookies had taken me out and they’d bought me drink after drink. My poison was Pernod and black and they came thick and fast. I ended up pouring each one into a pint glass. By the end of the night I’d drunk two pints of the vile stuff. I went to bed very merry and very drunk, with a tongue that was warm, wet and black.

The next day I was ill. Very ill. Some joker suggested I drank milk, a ‘great’ hangover cure. Never having had a hangover before, I did as he suggested. The half-pint of cold semi-skimmed took less than a minute to come back up, curdled and purple. I was truly poisoned. There was no sympathy. To be unfit for duty through drink, or to be drunk on duty, are poor conduct matters that can lead to disciplinary action.

However, the trainers were forgiving as long as I sat in the classroom and did my work, didn’t fall asleep and didn’t puke.

It was a lesson that taught me quite early on about policemen and their drinking habits. I was a quick learner and I’ve never drunk Pernod since, but I didn’t learn enough to stop me imbibing other poisons in the future …

It was customary for probationers to buy a round after their first arrest. And their first dead body. And their first court conviction. And every other opportunity that the ‘old sweats’ demanded. How we didn’t end up bankrupt, I don’t know.

Back then the shift used to mean working a whole week of night duty, then after finishing work on the Saturday morning, the guys would trot off to the Early House, a pub that opened at six in the morning for night-duty workers, post office workers, and those who worked in the markets like Smithfield and Spitalfields. The previous landlord of the pub had refused women entry, so female officers were exempt. However, a couple of years later he died and his son took over and for the first time the Early House saw women other than the regular Saturday-morning strippers. So of course when the doors opened, I had to go to the Early House. It was another obligatory initiation. Besides, the guys seemed to have so much fun on those Saturday mornings that I wanted to see what I was missing.

The first round cost me over twenty quid, which was a lot out of my spending money. The landlord took the opportunity those mornings to clean up his bar, so he only served pints and that was it. So I drank pints. Five of them …

Someone dropped me off home at my flat. I can’t remember who. My parents were coming for a visit that night and as I was on nights they were going to stay over. I’d bought them tickets for the theatre. I don’t remember them calling; my flatmate sorted them out. I woke up with less than two hours before I needed to be back at work for night duty. I was hungover and bleary-eyed and although very glad I wasn’t a police driver, I didn’t relish walking the beat in the cold rain. But, of course, it was obligatory.

Various stories that follow involve alcohol, and yes, you may assume that by the time I left the force I had been well and truly initiated. I could hold a drink or two. Or twenty. At my leaving do, I raised a glass of champagne and tried not to think of the innocent me of twenty years earlier, and how the alcohol-loving police officers got me in the end. Nor did I wish to remember the worst hangovers!

Cheers!

Prisoners, property and prostitutes

At training school we were warned about prisoners, property and prostitutes. If anything were to go wrong, it would usually have something to do with at least one of them. In the late seventies, around the Life on Mars years and before I joined the police force, I had dealings with all three.

Family circumstances had meant that I left home at seventeen and lived on my own in a cold and tiny flat opposite the sea. I needed two jobs to pay my bills, so I worked in an office during the week and in the cloakroom of a popular nightclub Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The money was rubbish but it helped. I fancied doing bar work, but the Fugly brothers who ran the tacky joint said I was too clumsy and not pretty enough. They may have had a point on the first and the book is open on the second.

One Thursday night, a long time after the supposed closing time, I was still at work in the club. It was about three in the morning and I was desperate to go home as I had to be up early for my office job. A drunken woman and her partner came to collect her coat but she couldn’t find her ticket. She told me it was a white fur jacket with tissues in the pocket. There were three men’s jackets and one white fur hanging on the rack. I found tissues in the pocket.

Maybe I shouldn’t have given it to her but I did.

Half an hour later, the Fugly brothers tumbled down the stairs from their exclusive hidden bar, arm in arm with women I knew to be prostitutes, followed by half a dozen regulars – CID officers from the local nick, with their own cackle of voluptuous prostitutes.

The next night uniformed police came to arrest the elder Mr Fugly, a wiry ex-boxer, for knocking out forged fifty-pound notes. He was back an hour later, no charges and big fat grin. He sat at the corner of the bar, laughing.

‘CID sorted me out. A case of mistaken identity,’ he said, throwing back a slug of Scotch: Prisoners.

A few days later the brothers called me in to see them. The younger of the two had so many rolls of flesh around his neck that he looked as though he was wearing a scarf. With his bald bulldog head and flaccid bottom lip, he was intimidating. He stood over me, drool slavering down his chin as he ate a bacon roll. It made me feel sick.

Apparently, I’d given away the wrong fur jacket. The nightclub had secret CCTV cameras that nobody knew about, but I did now. It showed a woman handing over a ticket at 11 p.m. I gave her a fur jacket from the corresponding hanger. At 3.30 a.m. it showed me handing over the other fur jacket to the woman who didn’t have her ticket. I could never understand how the first woman came by the ticket of a coat she says wasn’t hers. Or how the second woman identified the remaining jacket, down to the tissues in the pocket. Yet they had the wrong coats. It caused mayhem and that was the end of my beautiful career in hospitality. Thanks to Property.

Many years later, I dealt with a case involving a family headed by a matriarch who openly declared that back in the day she’d been a prostitute who slept with policemen and gave them information. She knew one of the officers on the case.

‘Old friends, sort of,’ she said.

A short time later the officer took early retirement.

Aye. Prisoners, property and prostitutes.

In your face

After an enlightening time at Hendon I was posted to the heart of the East End. On the night of my passing-out parade I stayed with my parents at the pub they’d just taken over on the border of Essex and London. After the events of that night, I realised that night nothing in my life was ever going to be straightforward again.

Early in the evening my father ejected a drug addict for shooting up heroin in the toilets. The youth, Tony Atkinson, came back at midnight when the only people left were a small gathering celebrating my day.

The huge front window smashed into a thousand shards as Atkinson bounded through it, threatening us with a sawn-off shotgun.

My father didn’t hesitate. He pulled back his old seafarer’s arm and punched him once, knocking him to the floor.

I grabbed my virgin handcuffs from the bar where I’d been showing them off, and I jumped on top of Atkinson. I didn’t think, didn’t hesitate. Foolish really. Thankfully, he was out cold. I sat on his chest, grabbed his arms and snapped on the cuffs.

Technically he was my first arrest but I didn’t go down on the custody sheet. The privilege went to the area car driver who was first on the scene. He was a decent arrest, what we called ‘a good body’ because Atkinson was wanted for offences of armed robbery, assault and drug dealing. The local police had been looking for him for weeks.

But the police didn’t only arrest Atkinson. They arrested my dad, too.

Atkinson was conveyed to hospital with concussion, my dad to a police cell. I spent the night at the station giving a statement, defending my father against a potential charge of GBH.

Atkinson could have pressed charges against my dad, and threatened to do so. I didn’t understand. No court would convict him, surely? It was a case of justified self-defence. Atkinson had a loaded gun and could have shot any of us. How was being knocked unconscious disproportionate to being threatened with and being in fear of a sawn-off?

It was a few weeks before we were informed there would be no further action taken against my father. Atkinson had done a deal and pleaded guilty.

It was certainly an introduction to policing.

A man’s world

In the early days, they tested policewomen in a way they never would, or could, today. I resisted the arse-stamping initiation, something they did, or tried to do, to all new female officers and some civilian workers too. A swift tug of their skirts and down with the underwear, they’d try to brand their bottoms with the station stamp, a sort of ‘you belong to us now’. I was very shy, embarrassed and could think of nothing worse. I wasn’t going to let them get me, but they had me in other ways. Messages such as ‘please ring Mr C Lion at London Zoo re an enquiry’ or ‘Mr Don Key at the local council’. One poor policeman was sent to the chemists to ask for some fallopian tubes. Like in many jobs, you learn to develop a sharp skill and quick wit that wasn’t in the formal job description. I had a good right hook, should it be necessary. But they had me in other ways.