Three Small Words...
The secret world of policing the dead
Brompton Cemetery (photo credit D. Walker, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea)
“We’re lucky, this one’s fresh,” said my tutor. I’d seen dead bodies before – I’d attended a hospital post-mortem a few weeks earlier – but Joan was my first sudden death. Joan was 78 and like many older people was an early-riser. When she didn’t answer the phone one morning, her daughter summoned the fire brigade. The firemen broke into her flat and found Joan dead.
Police are obliged to attend the scenes of unexplained deaths and I was a newly-minted probationer on what was called the Street Duties course. After passing out of Hendon Police College, you’d spend ten weeks of being ‘puppy-walked’ by a tutor constable on your new division. You’d make arrests, investigate ‘beat crimes’, breathalyse drink-drivers, report car accidents, write tickets, attend domestic incidents, stop / search people and (crucially) find a ‘tea-hole’, a place to cadge a brew when it was raining. You’d face the Angry Man, especially when the pubs chucked out. You’d almost certainly be assaulted for your first time as a police officer, knowing it wouldn’t be your last. Within a month I’d been headbutted and spat on.
Then there were ‘sudden deaths’. Some of us would have preferred to be headbutted than deal with one. Along with domestics, they were deemed especially ‘weary’, Met slang for anything unpleasant, tiresome or both. Guess who got the really weary jobs? Street Duties constables, that’s who.
Joan looked peaceful in death, although there were angry purplish marks on her back, buttocks and thighs. “Lividity,” said my tutor matter-of-factly, pointing with his biro. “It happens when the blood settles in the body after death. You’ll see it a lot.” Her daughter called the police because she thought the marks looked sinister.
“Okay,” I replied, carefully writing lividity in my pocket notebook.
“Put the pen down,” the tutor sighed. “D’you see anything suspicious? Is this a crime scene? You need to speak to the neighbours, see if they heard or saw anything. Then start thinking about property and valuables. They’ll need restoring to the next-of-kin, or taking back to the station for safekeeping.”
“Sure,” I said, feeling like an extra in an episode of ‘Colombo’. The little flat wasn’t exactly neat, but it wasn’t messy either. To my not-quite-trained eye, everything looked unremarkable. No signs of burglary or a struggle. The only forced entry was courtesy of the London Fire Brigade. “Everything looks okay,” I said finally.
“I agree. Still, we have to call the Filth,” my tutor replied. “They’ll take a look, just in case.” The Filth were divisional CID. It was policy to send a detective to every sudden death. My tutor shrugged on his uniform jacket. “You wait for the coroner’s officer.”
“What are you going to do?”
The tutor looked at his watch. “You’re a big boy, Dom, you can deal with him. I’m going for breakfast.”
So I bagged up Joan’s jewellery, some cash, her pension and cheque books. I made sure the broken door was fixed. I spoke to the neighbours. Then I gave Joan’s daughter a piece of paper with the coroner’s officer’s telephone number written on it. I stood with her while two big, smartly dressed men arrived in a black van marked ‘Private Ambulance’ to take Joan away. I remember this incident as vividly as her bruises. Her memory’s remained with me for nearly thirty years.
Yet three years - and dozens of bodies - later, I couldn’t remember most of the dead’s faces, let alone their names. On any given shift, a glance at the Met’s global computer-aided dispatch system (CAD) revealed London-as-Necropolis, a city of death - murders, road traffic and industrial accidents. There were suicides; hangings, overdoses and people throwing themselves in front of tube trains. The 40mph Piccadilly Line stations were especially popular with jumpers. British Transport Police dealt with deaths on the tracks and very good at it they were too, but Met officers were usually first on scene. BTP was thinly spread and we joked it stood for ‘Be There Presently’. I even remember an autoerotic asphyxiation. Two, actually. And of course there were natural but unexpected deaths like Joan’s.
Occasionally police would have to fish dead tramps out of the canal. When I joined there was a bonus payment for fingerprinting them for ID purposes (rather gruesomely, they amputated their hands first to make the process easier). I think it was a fiver. Now we have Live Scan, which is a computerised fingerprinting system. Back then it was ink, a roller and a fingerprinting block.
I was eating in the station canteen when someone mentioned a guy in a wheelchair had rolled himself off the top of a block of flats. We’d all dealt with jumpers (they’re not as messy as you think); I remember a woman falling twenty stories and hitting the roof of a Volvo parked below. It was 03:00. Just me, a colleague and the dead woman. After we called it in, checked her for ID and finished looking for witnesses, we casually discussed (a) the astonishing durability of Swedish cars and (b) how we suspected the body had fallen across a divisional boundary, meaning we could get someone else to do the paperwork. When the officers from a neighbouring station turned up to deal with it, we laughed at how clever we were.
By now death was an administrative inconvenience rather than a human tragedy. I was amazed how squeamish my non-police friends were, as if my lack of sensitivity were a superpower rather than a character defect.
I’ve described how death is facilitated (one way or the other) by cops. If Death’s a rock star, police are his roadies. And roadies have heard the greatest hits a hundred times before. I’m not proud of this desensitisation - quite the opposite. I would eventually come to resent the person I’d become. And the more I write, the more I begin to remember the dead. Troubled spirits, mostly, haunting my memories. I would suggest, though, hardened souls might manage the aftermath of their passing more efficiently than those faint-of-heart.
A year or so after Joan died I stood outside a neat Edwardian terrace, six unopened milk bottles on the doorstep. I gently rocked the toe of my size eleven boot against the jamb and popped the lock - I’d quickly learned to do as little damage as possible when forcing entry, because boarding-up services took hours to arrive. The deceased died while balanced precariously on the back legs of a kitchen chair. He was a big man, a rugby player perhaps, surrounded by a henge of empty whisky bottles. Checking his body for signs of life without us both falling over was like playing giant Jenga. The telephone rang just as I was radioing for the Filth, as I now called CID. It was the dead man’s estranged wife. “Who is it?” she demanded.
“It’s the police,” I replied sheepishly, hoping the dead guy wouldn’t fall off his chair while I was on the phone. It was a cardinal, nailed-down rule of death messages that bereaved parties were only ever informed in person.
“He’s finally gone and drank himself to death, hasn’t he?” she said matter-of-factly. “I knew this would happen.”
“Er, it looks like it Madam…”
Which brings me to death messages. I absolutely fucking loathed knocking on front doors bearing the news of a family member’s death - who wouldn’t? Death messages were definitely a new guy’s job. This means the Grim Reaper’s at your shoulder from the very beginning of your service. It’s also why death’s the origin of so much Job humour. It’s true – you can laugh or you can cry.
Or go mad, which more than a few of us did.
Not everyone slipped the veil as peacefully as Joan, or even whisky-chair guy. I now remember a too-warm Saturday afternoon spent in a rubbish-strewn hovel with a dead hermit. Six months gone, he’d melted into an electric heater, segueing into a sort of grisly flesh / household appliance hybrid. Bristling with maggots, he was like something from a David Cronenberg film. I ended up reeking of death, as if his tortured soul permeated my uniform. The stench of a rotting corpse is difficult to describe, but once smelt it’s never forgotten; Sweet. Gassy. Putrid. Meaty, with hints of sulphurous egginess. This still doesn’t do the sheer wrongness of the odour justice.
I was bagging up the old man’s property and waiting for the coroner’s officer, trying not to puke. Old people usually had interesting stuff, so as a historian by education I enjoyed sorting through old letters and photographs, establishing identity and next-of-kin. It also kept my mind off the maggots. The radio clipped to my lapel wouldn’t fucking stop crackling, the CAD room hectoring me; when will you be free for the next call? The temptation to key the mic and scream FUCK OFF was strong.
Another cop arrived, an old sweat. He took one look at the body, winked, and cracked an I’m-going-to-hell-for-that-one joke. I laughed and suddenly felt better. “If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined,” he chuckled, shaking his head at the horrible scene. This was a common refrain in the Job - awful stuff was simply a cosmic pun. I think it’s what Americans call “embracing the suck.” The old sweat handed me a styrofoam cup of tea. He sat with the body while I went outside to drink it. Never had dirty London air tasted so sweet.
Now for a Gene Hunt moment (the rant starts at 1 min 10 secs if you want to see Gene rip Lord Scarman a new one). People sometimes claim dark humour is emblematic of ‘Canteen Culture’. This phrase is now so misused as to be meaningless. When I hear it I want to reach for my imaginary revolver. I mean, they finally got the police force service they wanted, with its bean-bags and virtue-signalling and Twitter patrols.
How’s that working out?
Anyway, back to the dead.
Sometimes, policing the dead, you make a difference even if you didn’t know it. Take Paul. He was in a Ford Fiesta that collided head-on with a delivery truck. He had the bad luck of being front passenger, which traffic officers will tell you is the most dangerous place in a right-hand drive car. Seeing danger, the driver will instinctively steer to the offside and put the passenger on offer. In this case, the driver tested positive for cannabis and MDMA too. His injuries weren’t serious. I was told he later plea-bargained his way out of a conviction for causing death by dangerous driving. His wealthy parents hired a battalion of QCs and accident investigation experts. I know we don’t officially have plea-bargaining in the UK, but we kind of do.
Paul was eighteen or nineteen, I think. I got to him easily enough, as our old friends the fire brigade had cut off the Fiesta’s roof. Gently frisking Paul for ID, my hand slid into his chest cavity. When I pulled it free, the car’s blood-soaked tax disc was stuck to my surgical glove. His torso had taken the full impact of the collision, vaporising his ribcage. I spent the next fourteen hours as ‘Continuity Officer’, finally pulling back the sheet covering his body at the morgue. Paul’s mother and father’s grief hit me like a sheet of ice water. It really was like a moment from a TV drama. Is this your son?
Mum, unsurprisingly, lost it. I held her, not sure if she was going to attack or if she just needed a hug. It was probably a bit of both. I had less than twelve months service at this point and wondered… what training could have prepared me for this?
(Answer: None)
I finally went home to my twentysomething shared flat, took a shower and drank myself to sleep. I was back at work for 0600 the next morning. It never occurred to us we might need support beyond heavy drinking, camaraderie and black humour in the canteen (until they closed them because of ‘the culture’).
Talking of support, I think it’s a given that praise is a basic tool of good management. An occasional thanks guys would’ve gone a long way. Fat chance. When I was in uniform I hardly ever saw anyone over the rank of chief inspector, let alone talk with them. When senior coppers on TV news say “my officers are doing this”, or “my officers are doing that” it particularly boils my piss. They aren’t your officers. You’d probably sell them down the river for another crown or a bath star on your epaulettes. They’re the public’s officers. Not yours.
Fast forward to 2006 or thereabouts (remember, police years are longer than dog years). I’d been out of uniform for a decade and was serving on the Met’s new Counterterrorism Command, SO15. I was asked to review my personnel file before it was scanned, computerised and shredded. Storing paper files requires offices and offices are expensive. One of our HR people showed me a clutch of letters I’d received from members of the public. One especially lovely note was from Paul’s parents, written fourteen-odd years previously. They wanted to thank me for helping them on the most horrible day of their lives. They realised it must have been difficult for me too. They promised to remember me in their prayers. I’m not a religious man, but the prayer thing got to me. When people say that, I usually get the feeling they mean it.
I wasn’t going to cry. I stared out of the window instead, overlooking the Thames near Vauxhall bridge. I knew people drowned there occasionally. I re-read the letter. “I’ve never seen this before,” I said finally.
The HR person frowned. We were lucky, actually. HR gets a bad rap, but ours tried their best. They finally outsourced them, too. “What d’you mean?” she asked.
“These letters of thanks. Nobody ever told me about them.”
“Oh,” she replied sadly, tucking the letters back in the file for destruction. “What a shame.”
What a shame. Three small words that sum up how the police treats its own. Then again if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined.
Note: out of respect for the privacy of the dead and their families, some details that might identify specific incidents have been altered