Like Gwyneth, I felt my menopause start in my 40s

insist the offender won’t win and are determined to shrug off their horrible experience, and some set out to create good from evil. Paul and Diana must have been crushed with anxiety, but they made the best they could of it. Within weeks, they had set up the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and, while still no news emerged of what had happened to their daughter, for the next 17 years they poured all their energies into it until, sadly, Diana was diagnosed with early onset dementia.

By then, I had experienced murder close to home myself. In my case, it was a colleague, not a close family member, and so, while Jill Dando’s death in 1999 was emotionally draining for me and all the team, it was a long remove from what Paul and Diana were going through. None the less, like them, I was determined not to be dragged down by anger and vengeance. Yes, of course I was anxious to know who the killer was, but from years working to catch offenders, I knew that even a conviction could never put things right.

The idea of closure is just a cliché – the pain of losing someone close doesn’t go away because someone gets the blame. I came to realise a broader truth about crime, that we could never arrest our way out of the problem; there had to be a smarter solution.

Jill’s death proved to be a catalyst. I had wanted to establish a new approach to crime, but now I also wanted to create a lasting memorial to her. Partly at the prompting of John Stevens, then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, the two ambitions merged into one.

The Jill Dando Institute was created by public subscription – supermarket tills offered forget-me-not badges in her memory – and it has since grown into an entire department at UCL and one of the world’s largest academic centres devoted to cutting crime. It was genuinely original, a truly ly multidisciplinary approach with a task I described as, “examining the chains of events that lead to crime, to find and cut the weakest link”. The term I coined for the new discipline was Crime Science.

I had once thought the weakest link was the offender; in other words, if we caught more people we’d all be safer. But it turns out people are surprisingly hard to change. It was fine to lock up the thief, but far more effective to lock the car, or the front door; or, in today’s world, to put passwords on our laptops. What’s more, to my surprise, evidence