I became a Scenes of Crime Officer (SOCO) by accident. After university, I wasn’t sure what to do with my life when my brother in law, a police officer, told me his force was recruiting civilian scenes of crime officers. I loved photography which was a significant part of the job and it seemed an incredibly exciting area of work so I applied. To my surprise, I got it and after an intensive three month residential training programme, I attended my first crime scene. Most Scenes of Crime work is taken up with minor crimes and I spent most my time attending break ins and car thefts involving people who had little to start with. But, every now and then, I’d be called to a scene that, well, you couldn’t make up.
One night, on late turn, I was working in the city centre when I caught snippets of a police pursuit on the police radio. At that time, car theft was a massive problem. The ‘twockers’ (Taken Without Consent) as we called them were usually teenagers who would take the car for a joyride before dumping and, occasionally, setting it alight. From what I could make out this particular chase ended in a multi-storey car park, a favourite destination of car thieves because it offered a variety of escape routes which is exactly what happened that night.
I didn’t take that much notice because, as a SOCO, I played no part in catching them. If necessary, we examine the abandoned vehicle the following. To my surprise, however, the police operator called me up and told me to go immediately to the car park.
I arrived to find two young boys, cheeks stained with tears, sitting in the back of the police car looking absolutely petrified: their reaction , I assumed, to being caught. However, I still couldn't work out what I was doing there. The officer then asked me to follow him into the dank stairwell which was in almost total darkness as the lights had been vandalised.
Halfway down a set of stairs, he stopped and shone his torch upwards. A metre or so in front of me dangled a pair of legs. Looking up, I could make out the dark outline of a woman’s body, suspended from the ceiling. The police officer explained that in the darkness the boys had run headlong into this poor woman's legs. One of them had flicked on a lighter to see what it was and, seeing the body, they had become hysterical and had run screaming back up the stairwell straight into the arms of the police officer.
The woman, it turned out, had a history of mental illness and had walked out of a nearby hospital straight to the car park where she ended her life before anyone had noticed she was gone.
My job was to take photos which I did before returning to my van to finish my shift. The last I saw of the two boys, still trembling, they were being driven to a police station. I don’t know what happened to them. The police officers said it was karma but I like to think that the experience shocked them enough to stop them stealing cars.
It was another thirty years before I decided to write a crime novel - Breakneck Point - featuring a SOCO or CSI as they're often called today. We see these white suited people on television going in and out of crime scenes. They are exposed to more horrors than just about anyone else in the police service and the job they do is nothing less than remarkable, but I’d never read a book which centred on a CSI so, drawing on my own experiences, I decided to write my own. I wanted to show what it is like to deal with crime scenes and, although it is a work of fiction, my main character's feelings and observations reflect my own experiences.
We are endlessly fascinated by crime, but I wanted to explore something more; I wanted to show the devastating impact crime can have on an individual - any crime. I attended many crime scenes that would leave an indelible impression on me, but what stayed with me most were the victims.
By the time I arrived often the enormity of what had happened had begun to sink in. They were frightened and vulnerable. Just like those two boys in the car park that night. What I learnt was that it wasn’t just the victims of serious crime whose lives were destroyed. It was also the victims of minor crimes too. Crime is devastating.
CSI Ally Dymond's commitment to justice has cost her a place on the major investigations team. After exposing corruption in the ranks, she's stuck working petty crimes on the sleepy North Devon coast. Then the body of nineteen-year-old Janie Warren turns up in the seaside town of Bidecombe, and Ally's expert skills are suddenly back in demand. But when the evidence she discovers contradicts the lead detective's theory, nobody wants to listen to the CSI who landed their colleagues in prison. Time is running out to catch a killer no one is looking for - no one except Ally. What she doesn't know is that he's watching, from her side of the crime scene tape, waiting for the moment to strike.
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