Rule of policing number one – when something good falls into your lap, pass it up the chain of command as quickly as possible before something else bad can happen.
Round and round and round we go and where we stop nobody knows.
Right from the start Abigail used to moan and fidget as her hair was relaxed or braided or thermally reconditioned, but her dad was determined that his child wasn’t going to embarrass him in public. T...
Pictures of Cheam adorn the walls of planning offices of every Home County to serve as an awful warning.
Peter Grant,’ I said. ‘Recent arrival, slacker and man of very little fame.
Perhaps, I thought, the dead god gets folded into the existence of the new god, the way a dormant genetic variation can exist within an organism’s DNA—hanging about like an actor’s understudy until th...
People are conditioned by the media to think that black women are all shouting, and head shaking and girlfriending and oh no you didn’t and if they’re not sassy, then they’re dignified and downtrodden...
Oxley had something called a Brewdog Vagabond Pale Ale, which came in a bottle and which he claimed never to have tasted before.‘I’m trying new things,’ he said.Including a new suit in khaki chambray...
NOBODY LIKES a riot except looters and journalists. The Metropolitan Police, being the go-ahead and dynamic modern police service that it is, has any number of contingency plans for dealing with civil...
NIGHTINGALE AND I did what all good coppers do when faced with a spare moment in the middle of the day—we went looking for a pub.
Missing kids are tough cases. I mean, murder is bad but at least the worst has already happened to the victim—they’re not going to get any deader. Missing kids come with a literal deadline, made worse...
MY DAD says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop o...
MUCH AS I love the Jag, it’s too conspicuous for everyday police work. So that day I was driving a battered silver ex–Metropolitan Police Ford Asbo that, despite my best efforts, smelled vaguely of ol...
Keep breathing,’ I said. ‘It’s a habit you don’t want to break.
It took the Fire Brigade a day and a half to secure the remains of the house enough to recover Crew Cut’s body, which was described by Dr Jennifer Vaughan as ‘suffering from crush trauma’ and by Dr Wa...
It had a long and varied history, mostly involving crime, prostitution and the theater,
It gave me the eye—the fearsome gaze that sheepdogs use to keep their charges in line. But I gave it the look—the stare that policemen use to keep members of the public in a state of randomized guilt.
In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motor...
In some households you only have to turn up three times before you’re expected to make your own tea, draw up a chair in front of the telly and call the cat a bastard.
I've already told the police what happened, they didn't believe me. Why should you,' he said.'Because we're the people that believe people that other people don't believe,' I said.'How can I know that...