Confessions of an Undercover Cop. Ash Cameron

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,