Detective-Sergeant Harry Atkin - a biography

DS Harry Atkin (34, born 1934)
Flying squad detective-sergeant

Flaw: Lying – It’s not the best trait for a bobby to have, but so long as it’s only the scrotes or their mums that you’re lying to, or perhaps the brass upstairs on occasion, it’s fine. Just don’t lie to the DCI, because he can smell bullshit from a mile off.

Coping Mechanism: Aggression – It’s not that you like violence, but sometimes it’s just that kicking a scrote in the scrotum is the right damn way to solve a problem. Other times, a bit of shouting and looming keeps them in line.

Background
  The Commissioners Office Crime 8 are the crème de la bloody crème of the Met. Where there’s a blagger, there’s a Flying Squad copper right behind him, or sometimes lying in wait ahead of him. It’s good, proper policing. You get results, some thug gets himself banged up or, every now and then, punches his own ticket by not putting his shooter down when told.

  You’re a Londoner, born in one of several thousand brick-built terraced houses in the surrounding streets. Still, you didn’t grow up there. You were evacuated during the Blitz and spent most of your childhood on a farm in southern Cumberland. While there, you got to milk cows, play cops and robbers in the fields and watch the flashes on the horizon as the krauts bombed Barrow.

  When you went back to London, you brought a funny northern way of speaking back with you. Your parents were fine, but the house you were born in was gone and you were all now crammed into your gran’s house. It wasn’t so bad, but you quickly got used to having a sheet held up while you used the tin bath in the back yard.

  In 1948, the Flying Squad busted a gold bullion robbery at Heathrow Airport. Lots of fisticuffs and commendations all round. That catches the attention of a fourteen year old boy with no prospects. You doubled down at school, trying to make up for the time lost when you were working on the farm during the war, to get the grades you needed for the Metropolitan Police. You were certainly tall enough, so there was nothing to worry about there.

  You failed to get in the first time because your grades in English had been too low. The second time, you massaged the grade somewhat and told them your D was actually a B. It was only a little lie and it was in a good cause, so there was nothing really wrong with it. That white lie was vindicated a few years down the line when, in 1957, you were accepted onto CO8, the Flying Squad, without a word of falsehood. You were just genuinely good at the job.

  Arrests might have been up, but there was never a shortage of armed blaggings to investigate throughout the ‘60s, thanks to the violent antics of the East End mobs. In 1963, you got married to a girl called Helen. By 1964 you’d got your sergeant stripes (okay, so you cheated on the sergeants’ exam, but again, it was for a job you were genuinely good at) and in 1965, your divorce came through. That sort of thing happens on the force; even the DCI’s living in a little bachelor flat above a newsagent’s these days. Still, it let you start sowing it around a bit. For the past year or so, you’ve been shacked up with a WPC called Patricia Wilmott, but she’s just recently started talking about children and weddings, which were never part of the arrangement.

  The Kray twins became a big target for the Met’s Murder Squad and you were lucky enough to get seconded to the task force, under Inspector ‘Nipper’ Read. The work was less dramatic than the robbery stuff, with fewer high speed chases and running around with guns, but with a lot more interaction with the underworld elements. You actually met the Krays once in 1966, while doing surveillance on one of the pubs on their manor. You didn’t think much of their posturing and even, when someone tipped them off that you and two of your colleagues were watching, punched one of their lieutenants once when Ronnie objected to a bunch of ‘pigs’ spoiling the atmosphere of the Blind Beggar. There was a bit of fuss but the three of you, big hard bastards to a man, and coppers at that, stared down the thugs that gathered protectively around the twins.

  A few weeks later, Ronnie shot a rival, George Cornell, through the head in the very same pub. That was a bit of a kicker. Maybe if you’d been the only one of your team on surveillance in the Blind Beggar, you’d have disappeared rather than had a punch-up. It was amazing how few people saw a man getting shot dead in a crowded pub, but it seems one little shit, a bare-knuckle boxer called Samuel Trout, aka ‘Jimmy the Fish’, has developed a sense of righteous justice in exchange for the Met forgetting that he’s a criminal for a little while.

  You’re off up to your old haunt, Cumberland, to make sure this scrote-turned-grass makes it back to give evidence without picking up a hole in the head on his way.