DS Stuart Turner    played by Doug Rao

First appearance    # 400 (23/03/06)     

DS Stuart Turner was confident, up-front, intelligent. He joined the Sun Hill team after a spell at a West End nick. After graduating from university, he initially went into teaching, but the curriculum, day-to-day routine and endless rounds of disciplining unruly kids became tedious. He longed for more of a challenge and when his friend told him he was joining the Met, Stuart signed up too.

Deeply competitive, Stuart went on to surpass his mate at Hendon and got his first choice of borough posting. Stuart worked his way up the ranks quite swiftly. He joined the job and instantly knew that uniform wasn't for him. His strengths always lay in detection and interviewing suspects. He loved nothing more than lulling a suspect into a false sense of security in an interview, then delivering the killer question that pulled the rug from under them.

Stuart was a natural leader with apparent integrity, and took an intellectual approach to his work. He always kept abreast of the latest theories and could quote from psychology journals. However, he didn't like getting his hands dirty and was happy to leave the arrests to uniform or his DCs - they could break the rules for a collar but shouldn't expect his back-up if it went pear shaped.

It was difficult to dislike him though – although he was ambitious, and could be somewhat two-faced, his arrogance was a façade; his heart was always in the right place and he threw himself into his cases with the zeal of someone much less cool than he liked to think he was. Stuart left Sun Hill after Heaton asked him to join his specialist unit targeting human trafficking.