May 2013 Vogue: True Crime

Chris Brooks

The obsessive female detective is a familiar presence on our

television screens. But how does life on a real murder squad

compare?

It's a grim, lacklustre day in Barking, east London, and in a small grey office with the drabbest view in Britain - a window on to the North Circular - Detective Chief Inspector Sheila Stewart of the Murder Investigation Team, one of 42 female DCIs out of 235 in the Metropolitan Police, is crouched down on black patent stilettos rummaging through the contents of an enormous navy duffel bag. It contains all the kit necessary for the initial activity surrounding a homicide assessment.

"This is for in the car when you're on call," she explains in the gentlest of Scottish accents, brushing a sweep of tight ebony-coloured curls from her face. "It's got in it a warm jacket and a Met Vest - a stab-proof vest which I would wear if I was doing entries or anything to do with firearms." She holds up a bright yellow high-visibility jacket, still in its Cellophane wrapper, emblazoned with the word police - "Helps if you're out in plain clothes…" she murmurs, before throwing it aside. "There's a waterproof jacket; big, lovely blue overalls, for if something was very, very messy; a full forensic suit. And I've got my wellies in there, too..."

Finally, she unearths the source of her search: a huge, red, Eveready torch. Brand new. Completely unused. Does it not come in handy? The DCI wrinkles her nose. "Not really," she shrugs apologetically.

Which is, frankly, a bit of a disappointment. Because, if we have come to understand one thing from the ceaseless diet of female-starring detective dramas to which we are globally addicted - The Bridge, The Killing (Danish and American), Spiral, CSI, and an incident of upcoming dramas including Broadchurch, *The Fall * starring Gillian Anderson, and The Tunnel, an Anglo-French collaboration based on *The Bridge * - then it is this: no murder detective goes anywhere without a torch. How else are they meant to navigate unlit industrial units in the middle of the night, or run around open forests in lone pursuit of psychopaths, or rifle through cabinets containing confidential files on their corrupted colleagues? The Killing's Sarah Lund, who inhabits a Copenhagen so grimly lit that its citizens must buy that fabled Scandinavian furniture only in order to trip over it, has a more intense relationship with her Maglite than with any lover, colleague or child. But not DCI Stewart. Sheila needs only one piece of kit. And that's "probably my mobile phone". How very droll.

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It's a naive fantasy, of course, that murder detectives are at all like the lithe, stoic, sexually outrageous sleuths of our popular imagination. Television heroines like the flaxen-haired, leather-bound Saga Noren of The Bridge, or (my personal favourite) the Gallic goddess Laure Berthaud of Spiral- a woman so mired in her work she sleeps in her car, and yet still works a layered tee better than any woman alive - are, of course, about as realistic an interpretation of a detective as Sherlock Holmes. But, still, the archetype of the driven, impulsive, lone crusader is a powerful one. It's a revelation, then, to meet a real murder detective like Sheila. She looks too young, for starters, with a luminous complexion and robust practical demeanour that testifies to her rural Scottish upbringing - the opposite of the drawn-faced, brow-knitted obsessives I have come to know and love. Her face speaks not of the murders - the two shootings, the score of stabbings, the grisly domestic scenes of carnage - she deals with, nor the emotional toll of working with crime at its most devastating. She's kind and endlessly patient, describing the minutiae of procedure that followed the stabbing at a brothel after a bungled burglary, or how she dealt with the "massive information" surrounding the stabbing of teenager Seydou Diarrassouba on Boxing Day 2011 in front of "throngs of people". She's warm and friendly. She smiles. A lot.

When cases break, Stewart is very much the brains of the operation; it's a fallacy that detectives spend their days charging around revisiting crime scenes or examining witnesses, as we might assume. "You couldn't do it all," she says. In most incident rooms, the workload is spread among about 18 detectives, most of whom have been trained specifically for different roles. "I'm much more the co-ordinator," she continues. "I allocate things: the family liaison officer; someone to trawl through the CCTV. We'd have a house-to-house co-ordinator. I probably wouldn't meet the witness unless there was some problem - if we could give her any assistance with protection and that kind of thing… Then you've got one case officer who will take the case to court eventually, an exhibits officer, the telephones officer and a float." The biggest surprise is how rarely she even interviews the suspects. "We have specialist interviewers, so they would interview," she explains. So those psychologically charged detective/murderer interview showdowns we enjoy so much on screen? Pure fiction.

Stewart describes her most valuable skill as "good leadership. Being here, being open to talk to everyone, knowing the team, who they are, what their strengths are. I think the best managers are good people persons," she says. Good people persons? Tell that to Sarah Lund.

"I think The Killing is phenomenal, but Lund represents nothing I've ever known," says former Detective Chief Inspector Jackie Malton, on whom Prime Suspect's DCI Jane Tennison was based and who now consults film and television writers about procedural authenticity. "She's nuts. She cannot communicate. That's what's attractive about her. So she has you on the edge of your seat dramatically. But in the real workplace she wouldn't last five minutes. She doesn't talk to anybody."

And yet, despite the open doors, the culture of communication and the evident growth in women and other minority groups now working at the Met, detectives aren't immune to some of the clichés. The job still requires a degree of obsessive focus that can absorb detectives to the exclusion of all else around them.

"Job-pissed. That's the title we use, and it's very easy to fall into," says one of Stewart's colleagues, a sparky detective inspector who specialises in family liaison - "'cause I love chatting to people" - but prefers to remain anonymous. "I think it's something inbred," she explains. "Twenty years ago, when I joined the job, I thought I had to prove something - this feeling that to get to the top you had to be tough and ruthless and perhaps not have a family and not really have a life."

Malton agrees that historically women did have to shut down emotionally in a male-dominated work culture - "If you wept at the office, you'd be dead. You'd have had it!" - but so, too, was she equally guilty of shutting people out of her life. "We were so tenacious. The drive to find the person who did it becomes an obsession, because that's your job. I don't think you can form relationships when you're in the job. When I was working, my job came first."

Broken relationships and a fractured family life are casualties of the job. "Especially among detectives," announces Detective Inspector Keely Smith of the Homicide and Serious Crime Command. Smith - who deals with "the very, very top tier of criminals: drug importation, gun traffickers, contract killers" and was the first female DI on the Flying Squad - recalls: "When I first went on the Flying Squad, you're out all the time, carrying a gun, sleeping on the office floor, hardly getting home. The culture, back then, was that you worked hard but you played hard, so the times you had off you were out socialising with the team, getting back late. At that same time, my husband was doing a similar job. And our relationship nearly did come to an end." Such an atmosphere of unbridled machismo can make for sexual explosions. "That's why a lot of detectives are on their second marriage," cautions Smith. "I've only been married once, but I'm a third wife..."

A tiny, compact women with tidy, brunette hair, it's near impossible to imagine Smith at work, and yet she loved "the kudos" of being armed and the adrenaline of armed sieges. Now two years off her 30-year service (the time at which police can retire on a full pension) she is looking forward to a gentle retirement and spending time with "other women of a certain age", but she still gets an addict's kick from her work. "It is a bit like crack - not that I've ever tasted crack!" she corrects me quickly. "But it's like a drug, catching the baddies. And sometimes the high these days doesn't last as long, but you still get it."

Her addiction came at a price. Her marriage has survived, but Smith didn't have children. Couldn't have done, she says. "I wouldn't have liked to do the work I've done, the hours I've done and been a mum as well. I don't think you could do both. One of them would have to give - it'd either be family life or police life."

Although Stewart was one of only two women on a team of 30 when she joined the Crime Squad, and "debriefs took place in the pub", she's adamant things are not as they were. Married with two young sons, aged six and eight, she's very much available when she can be and when cases do break she says goodbye to the family and disappears for "five to 10 days, depending how you manage it". Her husband, a lecturer, manages her absences - at least "for the first two days…" - but Stewart does, on occasion, put her family first. "It's a fantastic job to do," she says, "but there does come a time when I don't need to be in the office for the whole 12 hours a day. I've always got my phone."

Another grey day, this time in central London, and the aftershocks of the Met's corruption scandals and Operations Weeting and Elveden are still rippling the walls of the meeting room at Scotland Yard, where I find DCI Nicola Wall. Wall has served 25 years at the Met, eight as a DCI, and heads up the Murder Investigation Team in west London. She's also a trained hostage and crisis negotiator. Married two years ago, her husband does contract work in the Middle East and she sees him sporadically. "We don't have children," she says briskly. "I've got the greatest respect for women who balance both - because that's fantastic - but I don't have to. And I've got a house in Putney, and I have a really nice life."

For Wall, there is no typical murder. No two jobs are the same. "We could end up with the Tia Sharp jobs of this world," she says of the 12-year-old whose body was discovered at her grandmother's house last August. "And then there are jobs that are equally as difficult as those, but that just somehow don't get that media spark." She usually has about six or seven live cases at any one time, and prides herself on her investigative speed; she is only partially joking when she attributes her low media profile to the fact "we solve cases so quickly nobody gets involved…"

A diminutive peroxide blonde, with fine cheekbones and a faint Derbyshire accent, she cuts an unusual figure. "I'm a bit different," she admits. "The jury nearly fell over last time I was in the box!" She's glad that the current crop of TV detectives are not "as mumsy" as their forebears and has a small fondness for Saga Noren "because she's quite feminine, very glamorous, very pretty and very capable, too."

As plainclothes officers, the detectives are united in their determination to look good. Wall especially enjoys playing with her femininity, if only to shake up the stuffier factions of the Met that still exist. "I usually wear a heel, and I always paint my nails," she says with a toss of her well-groomed head. "They usually brighten a day." The same sentiment is echoed by Detective Constable Katherine Thompson-Ashton, 34, an ambitious detective working with victims of domestic abuse, hate crimes and sexual assault. "I'm a very feminine person," says the single mother of a 16-year-old daughter. "I love fashion, it's one of my passions," she tells me a little warily over the phone, as though a love of clothes might jeopardise her hopes of joining the Flying Squad. "But it's about adapting my style to the right situation; perhaps working on a scene where someone's been seriously assaulted might not be the best place to be wearing a pair of stilettos or a Vivienne Westwood dress." She pauses. "Although her skirts are fabulous for work."

> But it's about adapting my style to the right situation; perhaps working on a scene where someone's been seriously assaulted might not be the best place to be wearing a pair of stilettos or a Vivienne Westwood dress. Although her skirts are fabulous for work.

During her time in the Met, Malton always wore heels, never wore trousers and invested in good suits from Max Mara. "And I always made sure I had a very good quality overcoat - a heavyweight detective coat - it was part of my signature." Malton wore her femininity as a matter of personal pride (more so, perhaps, because as an openly gay woman she was subject to myriad other prejudices in a male-dominated work environment). "It gives you a sense of strength and a sense of presence because you will slightly stand out. I was very proud to be a chief inspector in the Met, and felt that by dressing smartly people would take me seriously for starters."

There is an emphatic pride among the women in the work that they do. All believe they are doing good, all believe they are making the world a safer place and all are disgusted by the recent disclosures regarding police corruption. They are outstanding women. And yet, they cannot always deliver justice.

Sitting at a wooden table beside the criminal courts at the Old Bailey, DCI Stewart patiently awaits the outcome of a trial - a gang-related stabbing - on which she has been working for nearly a year. Despite the air of anxious anticipation, Stewart remains preternaturally calm. I wonder how important it is to get a conviction? Does she seek "closure" on a case? "I think the family do," she says. Personally "it depends on the case really. You do get emotionally linked in with different families or different circumstances. That's why we do it. Everybody wants a conviction because you don't want someone walking, really."

Ten minutes later, Stewart sits alongside the victim's mother as the jury returns a verdict of not guilty and both women watch the accused leave the dock a free man. Things like this never happen on the television. "It's a bit disappointing," says Stewart with a combination of practical resourcefulness and experience. "You have choices in life," she says of the accused (who was acquitted of the murder on a plea of self-defence). "And he didn't make the right one. So it's disappointing."

The

news is relayed back to the unit in Barking, and Stewart returns to

comfort the woman whose silent tears flow freely as she realises

her dead son will have no justice. But there is no anger here, nor

recrimination, nor any other demonstrations of righteous

indignation. It's a pitiable truth that some stories don't have

happy endings. Or resolution. How is it possible to protect oneself

from scenes such as these? Surely everyone has to become a

hard-nosed cop in the end?

Wall answers it best. "I don't think you harden to anything like that. Not at all," she explains. "After every case, you have to self-reflect. I always think about the person that's lost their life, because that's really who we work for, somebody who's been killed. They haven't got a voice any more. It's dreadful and you do get upset. And that doesn't diminish with time." But you keep doing it: "Because you're doing something good. Because it is commitment. Everything you've got, and every skill you've got, and everything you can muster to do is a very good thing to do. And when we get people, justice is done, but we can't bring the person back."