The Fall has put female detectives back under the spotlight. Stylist gets on the case of Detective Chief Superintendent Mary Doyle, head of public protection and forensic services at Greater Manchester Police

Words: Kathryn Blundell, Photos: The Sunday Times, Rex Features, BBC

If you’re like us, you’ve organised the last five Mondays around BBC Two’s utterly brilliant crime drama The Fall, which sees Gillian Anderson play ballsy detective superintendent Stella Gibson, seconded from the Met Police to Belfast to track down serial killer Jamie Dornan. Already commissioned for a second series, it’s seriously addictive television that succeeds in awakening our curiosity for the real world of police work.

A woman who knows the reality of this world is DCS Mary Doyle, 44, who joined the police after leaving school. She spent 17 years in the Met before moving to Manchester with her retired police officer husband in 2006, where she took on the role of detective superintendent – the fourth highest ranking position and commander of the criminal investigation department (CID) in most territorial forces. In the past couple of years alone, she has been involved in the Dale Cregan case, where the gangland murderer killed two policewomen when they arrived at a property in North Manchester to investigate a suspected robbery. Doyle also oversaw the conviction of Kiaran Stapleton, who, on Boxing Day 2011, shot student Anuj Bidve in Salford in cold blood.

Safe to say, it’s not what we’d call an average day in the office…

The Fall has had us glued to the television. How realistic are these police dramas?

I love The Fall, CSI and Blue Bloods, the female officers are strong and professional, which is realistic, but I do end up screaming at the TV when shows skew parts of the job. CSI’s bad for giving the impression that forensics can turn up comprehensive evidence in a short space of time, which can give victims of crime unrealistic expectations. People also see cases resolved very quickly and think it’s the same in real life. Six months is fast – Dale Cregan’s trial for the murder of a father and son and two police officers happened within five months of his arrest, and we had a conviction for the murder of Anuj Bidve six months after the crime. But then other high-profile cases take years, such as those involving sexual exploitation. Victims can be so traumatised that it’s too much to put them through the court process until they’re ready.

Do you have to sit through postmortems? How do they affect you?

I occasionally have to attend post-mortems. As part of my training I had to sit through nine back-to-back and it’s never really affected me. In a way, the bodies don’t feel like real people – that person has gone and you’re dissecting the body to look for evidence. It’s a purely scientific thing, though some police officers find some [of the more gory] elements hard to take. These days, postmortems tend to be viewed from behind a glass screen to reduce the risk of infection, but I prefer to be in the mortuary. In Greater Manchester Police we have a bespoke forensic mortuary with cameras, so we can zoom in if the pathologist finds anything the senior investigating officer needs to look at closer.

The real world of police work