What it’s really like to be a woman in the Met
The terrifying showdown with a sex attacker. The harrowing rescue of a girl from a violent home. In a startling new memoir, a former off icer reveals ...
THE 999 call was not an unusual one for PC Alice Vinten. Aft e r receiving reports of fighting at a bail hostel, she reckoned the only danger might be from a makeshift weapon: a golf club, screwdriver or, at worst, perhaps an ‘ornamental’ samurai sword.
Horrifyingly, she found herself facing a convicted sex offender known to target female police officers, a man she had dealt with before in the relative safety of a police station. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t remember you?’ he asked. ‘ Nice try, pretty, but I never forget a face.’
He added chillingly: ‘Plus, I recognise your perfume…’
The ex-con then grabbed her and threw her to the floor, using his superior bodyweight to pin her down. Alice managed to open the emergency frequency on her police radio and croak the name of the officer who was attending the hostel call with her. Oblivious to the danger she was in, he had been tending to an injured man, but within seconds he was kicking the door open and coming to her rescue.
Many women would have been taken away to receive medical help or counselling after such a terrifying ordeal, but for Alice it was just an ordinary shift.
By the time she got back to her police station in North London, it was her bird’s-nest hair – her neat bun had come undone in the melee – rather than her bravery that aroused most comment. One officer had even taken a picture of her dishevelled state to stick on her locker door. The colleague they all called Big Al on account of her 5ft 11in frame had come home with a great tale to tell in the canteen. But Alice would eventually pay a high emotional price for this and all the other adrenaline- fuelled encounters with drug lords, gangsters, viol ent mental health patients, would-be jihadis threatening to blow up rush-hour Tube stations, and feral youths. Today she believes she has a mild form of post- traumatic stress disorder as a result of her service.
Certainly she has a bad case of heartbreak, for many of the cases she recounts are more sad than savage: the junkie mother who had given up nine babies to social services, or the lonely widow whose body was so decomposed, it had dissolved into the fabric of the armchair in which she died.
Alice, 36, has now quit the Metropolitan Police to which she hoped to dedicate her life but has recounted her ten-year career in an extraordinary memoir, Girl On The Line.
‘ I never wanted to leave the front line for an office but I hoped to make it to chief inspector,’ she smiles. ‘I think I would have been a good one too.’
Instead, motherhood and modern policing, where even the most routine street stop or house call can expose an officer to the gravest danger, proved an impossible match. After the birth of her sons, now aged nine and six, Alice found herself hopelessly riskaverse, still running towards 999 calls but terrified rather than exhilarated by them. Post-natal depression spiralled first into anxiety and eventually to PTSD.
‘I didn’t feel invincible any more and you have to have that, you have to believe you’ll be the one who walks out alive. By the end I didn’t. I’d been through too much, seen too much,’ she says. ‘When I
NICE TRY, PRETTY, SAID THE SEX OFFENDER. BUT I NEVER FORGET A FACE
came across damaged children – scared little girls hiding under a bed while their dad beat up their mum – they’d keep me awake and then in my dreams they’d turn into my own boys.
‘My mind would start superimposing my children on to the violent scenes which were part of my daily playbook.’
Alice was only able to cleanse herself of the memories by writing them down. Girl On The Line traces her path from rookie constable with nothing more than a strong moral compass and a warrant card to protect her, through her binge-drinking efforts to be one of boys, up to experienced officer. It also reveals the secret she carried with her throughout her career: while at Hendon Police College she chose to have an abortion. The pregnancy was unplanned. Her then boyfriend made it clear it wasn’t what he wanted and Alice herself had deeply invested in her police training. When the pregnancy test c a me b a c k p o s i - t i ve, she was just nine weeks into her 18- week course at Hendon, having waited two years for a place. The termination has never been a source of regret but nor was it something she did lightly. She believes her moral dilemma and its sad legacy made her more human when she was in uniform, more aware of the flaws and failings of others. ‘As a police officer you’ll never meet 95 per cent of the local population. The other five per cent – the ones for whom life is ugly and unlucky – they are the ones you see all the time, the ones who need you.
‘You have to see them as they are, as damaged people. Yes, some are career criminals but many are just at the bottom of the pile in society.
‘I am not ashamed of my abortion and I think it made me a different sort of police officer, the kind who would rather talk someone down from a ledge than run into a riot. But to succeed as a woman in the police you have to be as hard- boiled as Jane Tennison i n Prime Suspect. There really is no room for femininity. Becoming a mother made me conscious of that. I stopped being able to forget the horrors by having a drink with the team at the end of the shift. I hid my feelings. I tried to be first and fastest on a call, because I didn’t want my male colleagues to think I’d become what they’d call “a proper Doris”.
‘But in the end I just could not carry on. Ultimately, I also lost faith in the police, the fact that we were only ever containing problems, not solving them.’
So she left in 2015 and moved to Leigh on Sea, Essex, to launch a writing career and spend more time with her sons. She is separated from her husband, murder squad detective John Vinten, but the pair are still close and they share parental duties.
As for her would-be rapist, she will have her revenge not in court but in print. He is the inspiration for the serial killer at the centre of a novel she is now writing. ‘The star is a uniformed female officer with a secret.’ So is she actually Alice? ‘ No’ she laughs. ‘ She’s way cooler than me!’
YOU HAVE TO BE AS HARD BOILED AS JANE TENNISON IN PRIME SUSPECT. THERE’S NO ROOM FOR FEMININITY
Girl On The Line, by Alice Vinten, is published by Two Roads, priced £16.99. Offer price £12.74 (25 per cent discount) until May 27. Order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640 – p&p is free on orders over £15.