Lillian May Armfield joined the New South Wales Police Force in 1915 – the first policewoman appointed in Australia and possibly the first in the world to undertake the dangerous duties she performed with such courage. Here are the turbulent lives of the people she helped and apprehended; murderers, drug addicts and dope peddlers, perverts, peeping Toms, white-slavers, and of girls who went wrong – often for no obvious reason – to finish their lives in a brothel, a jail cell, or on a mortuary slab.