It’s a fair cop… the switch from Mum to Ma’am was tough
Ex-Inspector Clare reveals why she quit frontline policing for her family and the safer thrills of crime-writing
JUST hours earlier, Clare Mackintosh had been standing in her kitchen in a flour-covered apron making cakes with her three young children. Now the senior Thames Valley police officer was standing on a raised mound outside Oxford’s Kassam Stadium as beer bottles and bricks sailed past her head.
“I went from Mum to Ma’am in a heartbeat,” she recalls, “watching my team in full riot gear, holding Perspex shields and helmets, lined up to prevent an incursion by battling football fans.”
Before becoming a full-time writer in 2011, Clare was Thames Valley’s operations inspector for Oxfordshire. “I specialised in public order and large scale events, risk assessing and putting in the appropriate level of response,” she explains. Having had her children, now 14 and twins aged 11, she returned to duty.
“It was an escape that gave me back my identity. I didn’t feel particularly good at handling three very small children. Going to work was very important to me.”
However, everything changed for the highflying officer during an interview designed to help her prepare to move to the rank of chief inspector.
“My in-depth appraisal talked about how I was full of energy, ready to listen, full of ideas… I showed my husband, then a PC, and he said ‘Who is this woman?’,” she admits. “It was a huge wake up to realise my family were getting the dregs of me.
“I’m a huge believer in women being able to have it all, but just because I could didn’t mean I wanted to. I realised I had lost sight of being the sort of mother I wanted to be.
“I don’t regret leaving the police, although I’m sometimes sad about the career in senior leadership I thought I was going to have.”
She took a career break and started to write. “It was the only other thing I knew how to do because for two years I’d been writing an anonymous blog.
“I’d been writing candidly about parenting, post natal depression and sex after childbirth – things I didn’t want my chief constable to know about. I was offered a £50-a-month column and approached my new career as if it was a business.”
She had, it turns out, plenty to write about.
ON ONE occasion, Clare recalls sitting at a table with a Unite Against Fascism (UAF) representative and one from the English Defence League (EDL) – a far-right Islamophobic organisation famed for staging street demonstrations that often turned violent. “Both groups were agreeing to police requests to stay within designated areas,” she says.
“But although my job was to stop the two groups meeting, all three of us knew they’d always find a way because – for a faction in those groups – it was all about the fighting.”
As she predicted, the demonstration flared out of control. “There was a violent clash. Both groups reneged on the agreement we’d spent two hours talking out and went looking for each other.”
But is violence ever justified, I wonder?
In her compulsive new thriller, Hostage, environmental activists hijack the plane having been told by their leader to fly until it runs out of fuel if the government won’t bring forward environmental target dates. It is a filmic scenario that propels you through the pages to a gripping, stomach-churning conclusion.
“I want so much to sit on the fence on this one,” smiles Clare.
“But if forced, I’d say no. We aren’t animals.We have to find a way to negotiate and demonstrate passion and conviction without resorting to violence.” She admits that there were times as a police officer where she felt sympathy with the protesters she had been tasked to police.As a newly-minted officer in Oxford, she joined the force at a time when protests against animal testing were an almost daily occurrence.
“This was thanks to the numerous laboratories housed within university buildings,” she explains. “As a law enforcer, one is required to separate personal beliefs from professional exigencies, and regardless of my own views on animal testing, I was dutybound to protect those scientists in the firing line.”
While the vast majority of demonstrators were law-abiding citizens exercising their right to protest, a “vocal few” were not. “I found it fascinating that a person who cared so deeply about animals that they would devote their life to protecting them could at the same time care so little about a human that they would set fire to a family home. Is it okay to kill a person if you save an animal? How about if you save a forest? A river?”
These are the moral conundrums that make her book so very compelling; at every turn you find yourself wondering ‘what would I do’ – particularly if the safety of your own child was being threatened by hijackers urging you to collude with them, as it is for her latest protagonist Mina, a flight attendant given a horrific ultimatum.
“I’m aware that – to put it mildly – the environmental activists in my novel are not heroes,” admits Clare who has now sold more than two million copies of her novels worldwide. “They are fundamentalists, and fundamentalists are rarely sympathetic.”
Astonishingly, while she was working on the first draft of her new book – a modern take on the classic locked-room thriller, set 40,000 feet above the earth – life imitated art when a protester grounded a plane at
‘My family were getting the dregs. I realised I had lost sight of being the mother I wanted to be’
London City airport and delivered a lecture on climate change as cabin crew attempted to remove him.
“I think we’ll see more demonstrations at airports and on planes as the effects of global warming worsen – environmentalists taking more extreme action in an attempt to make their voices heard. Whatever your views on protests, it is hard to argue with the science,” she says.
CLARE remembers that just 12 months before she became a member of the police, she was a “hotheaded” student vocal about all manner of issues.
“I didn’t think it was right to torch a scientist’s house, but neither did I think it was right to drip shampoo into a rabbit’s eye – the very idea was abhorrent.
“But when you join the police you don’t get to pick and choose which laws you uphold. Frontline police officers don’t have half the autonomy I think people assume they have. It’s hard to be a maverick.”
She describes it as an incredibly hard job.
“I know from friends in the force that morale is pretty low at the moment. You see hero stories about the emergency services, NHS workers, coastguards and AA personnel. In the police, it feels like you are being constantly kicked.
“Yet, every day you do a hard job with limited resources. There is corruption of the occasional bad apple, but the vast majority of officers want to make the world a safer place.”
After studies at Royal Holloway university, where she read French and management studies, Clare was one of 12 applicants accepted on to a fast-track graduate police course from a field of 3,000 before she decided to drop out of the programme to earn senior promotion in CID on her own merits.
After the turning point in her high-flying career that saw her eventually leave the police, Clare “reinvented” herself. She moved into corporate copywriting while working on her first novel, I Let You Go, published in 2014 to huge acclaim.
Success with three subsequent novels and a memoir has enabled her family to move from Oxfordshire to a Georgian manor house in the Snowdonia National Park where her husband now works for the South Snowdonia Mountain Rescue Team.
But despite the idyllic surroundings, ten years on Clare is still haunted by some of her cases – domestic tragedies that underpin her writing career.
“I once went to speak to a man whose wife had given birth before taking her own life. There are very few jobs where I have cried in front of the public; it’s not our grief and we have a responsibility to keep things together. But I went to my car and I wept.”
She gets upset talking about it to this day. “She would have been okay. In another few days she would undoubtedly have been a wonderful mother to that baby. It was such a tragedy,” she says.
“The public don’t think about those sorts of jobs; the ones where no crime has been committed. The suicides to which the police are called every day; the tragic accidents; the picking up of pieces, and the shielding of the bereaved from the public gaze. I think about that family all the time.”
‘Every day you do a hard job. The vast majority of officers want to make the world a safer place’
●●Hostage by Clare Mackintosh (Sphere, £14.99) is out now. Clare will be in conversation with author CL Taylor on July 23 at the 2021 Theakston Old Peculier CrimeWriting Festival in Harrogate.Visit harrogateinternationalfestivals.com for more details