DS JO BODEN CHARACTERS: THE CAMBRIDGE TEAM

The unit. Boden works on the Cambridge-based unit of the tri-force Major Investigations Team, covering Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire. It is chronically short of trained detectives, so it picks up local CID work as well as murder.

DS Jo Boden. Detective sergeant. Transferred in from the Met with a reputation she doesn’t discuss. Good with facts, wary of feelings, better on the street than at a desk. Keeps refusing to sit the inspectors’ exam.

DC Prisha Chakravorty. Started in the job as an analyst, so she thinks in patterns. Small, easy to overlook, and consistently underestimated. Jo’s working partner.

DC Scott Mackie. Shaved head, cauliflower ear, mistaken for a thug roughly once a week. Ex-response, drives too fast, and the first of the three to well up.

DI Tom Roscoe. The DI with the most time served. Ambitious. He and Jo had one date; they agreed never again.

DCI Alistair Hepburn. The boss. A stickler for procedure and for covering his own back, which Jo finds tiresome and useful in roughly equal measure.

Police constable. The cops in uniform, often working on response (see below).

DC, DS, DI, DCI. The ladder. Detective constable, detective sergeant, detective inspector, detective chief inspector. Detectives are not a separate service; they are police officers who have gone into investigation. A DS runs the legwork. A DI runs the DSs. A DCI runs the case.

Superintendent, Detective Chief Superintendent, Assistant Chief Constable, Chief Constable. Above the DCI, the ranks stop investigating and start managing. The Chief Constable runs an entire force.

Police and Crime Commissioner. An elected politician who holds the Chief Constable to account and sets the local policing budget. Not a police officer. Rarely popular with police officers.

Boss, sir, sarge, skip. What people actually say. Sergeants are “Sarge”. Senior officers are “sir” or “ma’am” in front of others and “boss” the rest of the time. Skip is short for skipper, a more old-fashioned name for sergeants that sergeants hate.

SIO — Senior Investigating Officer. The one whose name is on the murder. Usually a DCI. Every decision is logged, and every logged decision can be read back to them later at some length.

Gold Commander. For a firearms operation or a major incident, command splits into Gold (strategy, off site), Silver (tactics) and Bronze (on the ground). Gold decides what is to be achieved; the others decide how.

CID — Criminal Investigation Department. The plain-clothes detectives in a local area, dealing with everything from burglary upwards.

MIT — Major Investigations Team. The murder squad. Serious and complex crime only, drawn from a wider area than a single town.

Response. The uniformed officers in cars who arrive first, at speed, at whatever has just happened. Most detectives start there.

NCA — National Crime Agency. Britain’s national agency for organised crime, trafficking and the bigger end of everything. Sometimes described as a British FBI, which is not quite right but saves time.

A shout. A call-out. Something has happened and you are going now.

Blues and twos. Lights and siren.

ARV — Armed Response Vehicle. British police are not routinely armed. Firearms officers travel in dedicated vehicles and are deployed to specific incidents, which is why waiting for armed response is a thing that happens in these books.

The cordon. The blue and white tape. Everyone crossing it is written down, on the assumption that a defence barrister will one day want the list.

Warrant card. The identification every officer carries. Losing one is a career event.

To nick. To arrest. The nick is the police station. Both are used constantly and neither is rude.

HOLMES, standing for Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, is the specialised computer system specifically for major crimes investigations. The connection with Sherlock is incidental. It generates the “actions” — individual tasks — allocated to each officer on an inquiry.

PNC is the Police National Computer. The core database used by officers. Records who has previous convictions, who owns which vehicle, and who is currently wanted.

CSI, CSM, forensics. Crime scene investigators do the recovery. The Crime Scene Manager runs the scene and decides who is allowed to walk where.

PM — post-mortem. The autopsy. The pathologist’s findings, especially time of death, tend to decide what the inquiry does next.

ANPR — Automatic Number Plate Recognition. Britain has a national network of cameras reading number plates. If a car went somewhere, there is usually a record.

CHIS — Covert Human Intelligence Source. An informant, in the language of the paperwork. Handling one is heavily regulated and rarely simple.

Misper. Missing person.

OCG — Organised Crime Group. The official term for a firm, a gang, a crime family.

PACE. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which governs how arrest, search and interview must be conducted. Warrants are granted under specific sections of it. Get PACE wrong and the evidence goes.

Custody sergeant, custody suite. The sergeant who runs the cells is independent of the investigation and can refuse to authorise a detention. Detectives find this irritating, which is the point.

Caution. Two meanings. The words read on arrest, warning that silence may count against you. Also a formal warning given instead of prosecution, which still goes on the record.

Duty solicitor. “No comment.” Anyone in custody is entitled to free legal advice. The standard advice is to answer nothing, which is why interviews in these books can be long and unproductive.

Charge, bail, remand. Charged and released to return later is bail. Charged and held in prison until trial is remand.

CPS — Crown Prosecution Service. Prosecutors, independent of the police, who decide whether a charge goes ahead. Police make arrests; the CPS decides whether there is a case.

Coroner. An independent judicial officer who investigates sudden or unexplained deaths, and who must be satisfied before a body can be released to the family.

IOPC — Independent Office for Police Conduct. Investigates complaints and serious incidents involving police, independently of the forces themselves. A referral to the IOPC is not a good day. Until January 2018 the same body was called the IPCC — which is the name used in the first book in this series, set the year before the change.

CCRC — Criminal Cases Review Commission. The body that examines possible miscarriages of justice and can send a conviction back to the Court of Appeal. Slow, and the last door available.