Forensics

by Val McDermid

  SIOs combing the area around Sharon Beshenivsky’s murder scene for evidence

  ‘But if we can develop real-time forensics, what a difference that could make. If somebody’s house gets broken into and we find some potential DNA evidence, we’ve still got to get that DNA evidence from the crime scene via a courier to the lab. It’s got to be booked in and finally it’s got to be processed. Currently we are fast-tracking certain evidence from burglary scenes, turning DNA around within nine hours because burglary is such a priority. Why wait two or three days to get a burglar’s ID when you can have it in nine hours, get them in custody and stop them burgling someone else tonight? So we’re using major crime principles for volume crime. Similarly with fingerprints. We’ve really speeded that up, but if we could scan the print at the scene that would speed it up even more.

  ‘Imagine this. If we get to a burglary within an hour and we examine it within half an hour, we could potentially have a burglar’s name within an hour and a half of the crime being discovered. The police then go and knock on their door and they’re still there with the stolen property in the bag. So the victims get their stuff back. And the burglars start to understand there’s no point.’

  As well as the satisfactions, the job comes with stresses and pressures. We make high demands on the people we expect to deliver justice, and we don’t always appreciate how much it eats away at them. Peter Arnold says, ‘We see some of the worst things that mankind can do to each other and I still get shocked by some of the things that occur. Most people can go home and talk to their families about what they’ve done at work. We can’t. But even if I could, I don’t want my family to know some of the things that I’ve seen.’

  TWO

  FIRE SCENE INVESTIGATION

  ‘It’s usually pretty dark, smelly, uncomfortable and physically demanding. The days are long and you come home filthy and stinking of burnt plastic. There’s nothing glamorous about it.

  But it is fascinating.’

  Niamh Nic Daéid, fire scene investigator

  Sunday, 2 September 1666. A family servant coughs himself awake in Pudding Lane, London. Realising there’s a fire in the shop below, he pounds on the bedroom door of his master, baker Thomas Farriner. The whole household crawl along rooftops to safety, except for the maidservant Rose, who, paralysed with fear, perishes in the blaze.

  Soon flames begin licking the walls of neighbouring houses and the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, is called upon to authorise the firemen to pull buildings down to stop the fire spreading. Bloodworth is angry at having his sleep disturbed and ignores the firemen’s urgent demands for drastic action. ‘Pish!’ he says. ‘A woman could piss it out.’ And leaves the scene.

  In the middle of the morning, diarist Samuel Pepys experiences ‘the wind mighty high and driving [the fire] into the city, and everything, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches’. By the afternoon London is in the grips of a firestorm, roaring through ‘warehouses of oyle and wines and Brandy’, wooden houses, thatched roofs, pitch, fabrics, fats, coal, gun powder – all the flammable material of life in the seventeenth century. The immense heat of the blaze makes escaping gases rapidly expand and rise, sucking in fresh air at gale force speeds, feeding the inferno with yet more oxygen. The Great Fire has created its own weather system.

  When the fire abates four days later, it has destroyed most of the medieval City of London, including more than 13,000 houses, 87 churches and St Paul’s Cathedral. Roughly 70,000 of the city’s population of 80,000 are suddenly homeless.

  The ashes were still warm when the conspiracy theories started. Most Londoners could not bring themselves to believe the fire was an accident. There were too many coincidences for that; it started among tightly packed wooden buildings, while everyone slept, on the one day of the week when the streets were empty of helping hands, when a gale was blowing, and the Thames lay at low tide.

  Rumours of foul play were rife. A surgeon, Thomas Middleton, had stood at the top of a church steeple and watched as fires seemed to break out in several distinct and distant places at once. ‘These and such like observations begat in me a persuasion that the fire was maintained by design,’ he wrote.

  Foreigners in particular were suspected, with one Frenchman beaten nearly to death in Moorfields for carrying ‘balls of fire’ in a box; they turned out to be tennis balls. Poems and songs expressed the bewilderment at the fire’s origin and cause:

  origin and cause:ed out to be tennis balls.

  Whether from Hell, France, Rome, or Amsterdam.

  Anon., ‘A Poem on the Burning of London’ (1667)

  The desire to know the truth started at the very top. Charles II had lost more property in the fire than anyone else. The king empowered parliament to set up a committee of inquiry into the fire. Scores of eyewitnesses came forward. Several said they had seen people throwing fireballs, or confessed to throwing them themselves. One Edward Taylor said that on Saturday night he went with his Dutch uncle to Pudding Lane, found the window of Thomas Farriner’s bakery open, and threw in ‘two fireballs made of gunpowder and brimstone’. But as Edward Taylor was only ten years old his account was dismissed. Robert Hubert, the simpleminded son of a French watchmaker, confessed to having started the fire. No one really believed him but because he insisted the jury found him guilty, and he went to the gallows at Tyburn.

  One member of the parliamentary committee, Sir Thomas Osborne, wrote that ‘all the allegations are very frivolous, and people are generally satisfied that the fire was accidental’. In the end, the committee decided that the dreadful conflagration was caused by ‘the hand of God, a great Wind, and a very dry season’.

  It’s not surprising that the committee arrived at so unsatisfactory a conclusion. For investigators to evaluate complex fire scenes, they need to understand how fire works. Back in the seventeenth century, the scientific knowledge was woefully insufficient. It wasn’t until 1861, when Michael Faraday put his lectures on fire into a book, that such understanding became readily available to a wide audience. The Chemical History of a Candle was the published version of six lectures he delivered for a young audience, but it is still regarded as a key text on the subject. Faraday used the candle as a symbol to illuminate the general nature of combustion. In one key lecture he snuffed a candle out by putting a jar over it. ‘Air is absolutely necessary for combustion,’ he explained. ‘And, what is more, I must have you understand that fresh air is necessary.’ By ‘fresh air’ he meant ‘oxygen’.

  Faraday was an early expert witness, taking with him his findings from the laboratory – sometimes quite literally. In 1819 the owners of a sugarhouse destroyed by fire in Whitechapel, London, sued their insurance company who had refused to pay out £15,000 compensation. The case turned on whether or not a newly developed process involving heated whale oil – which the owners had started using at the factory without the insurers’ knowledge – had made the fire more or less likely. Before testifying, Faraday performed experiments on whale oil, heating it to 200°C to demonstrate that ‘all the vapours of the oil, except water, are more inflammable than the oil itself’. In court a member of the jury did not believe him, so Faraday set fire to some of the oil’s distilled vapours (naptha) which he had brought with him in a vial, ‘a most offensive smell being at the same time perceived throughout the court’.

  Michael Faraday, whose 1861 book The Chemical History of a Candle paved the way for modern fire scene investigators

  Faraday’s most important forensic investigation was into an explosion at Haswell Colliery, County Durham, which killed ninety-five men and boys in 1844. The blast occurred at a time of industrial unrest in the Durham coalfield. The lawyer acting for the grieving relatives petitioned the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, to send government representatives to the inquest. Faraday was among those sent.

  The team spent a day visiting the mine, investigating in particular its air flows. At one point, Faraday realised he was sitting on a
keg of gunpowder near a naked candle flame. He leapt to his feet and ‘expostulated with them for their carelessness’. The jury reached a verdict of accidental death, with which Faraday agreed. But the team submitted a report on their return to London noting that coal dust had played a major part in the explosion, and recommending that the ventilation be improved. The mine owners objected, because of the costs of improvement. The risk was ignored for sixty years, until a similar explosion in 1913 led to the death of 440 miners at Senghenydd Colliery in Wales – the worst mining disaster in UK history.

  In the twentieth century, the Fire Service and the scientific community developed fire scene investigation in tandem, encouraged by governments who wanted to know how many fires there were, their origins and their causes. In the 1960s and 1970s investigations became more rigorously scientific: protocols were adopted; new instruments enabled complex chemical mixtures such as petrol to be identified at fire scenes; and experts in the field began to emerge. Partly as a result of this increased understanding, it is now rare for a fire or an explosion – which is essentially an expedited fire – to cause such horrendous loss of life in peacetime. But when they do, they leave an indelible impression on those who investigate them.

  Among those who became the new experts in fire investigation were an Irish husband and wife. Their daughter, forensic chemist Niamh Nic Daéid of the University of Dundee, has continued their legacy, searching for the truth amid scenes of terrible destruction. Niamh explains. ‘I have a legacy in forensic sciences, if you like, because my parents were both independent fire investigators, and indeed my mother still does fire scene investigation, so I grew up with it. Myself and my brother used to make our pocket money by sticking Mum and Dad’s fire pictures into reports – for five pence a picture. As you can imagine, the conversation around the dinner table was always about fires.’

  Whether fire obliterates someone’s property or their dearest relative, the investigator works at the point of collision between nature’s most violent force and the human world it wrecks. I was forcibly reminded of that when I asked Niamh about fires that had particularly affected her. The first words out of her mouth were: ‘The Stardust disco fire.’

  I was asleep in my bed in Derbyshire in the early hours of Valentine’s Day, 1981. I was a young journalist, based in the northern newsroom of a national Sunday paper. I’d never covered a major disaster but I knew that was about to change when a ringing phone woke me in the small hours of the morning. The familiar gruff voice of my news editor said, ‘There’s been a major fatal fire in a Dublin disco. It’s looking like dozens dead. You’re on the seven o’clock plane.’

  By the time I got to Manchester Airport, the radio had confirmed what I’d already been told. A massive fire. A horrifying death toll of young people who’d set off for a fun night out and who wouldn’t be going home. Inside the airport, journalists and photographers milled around, looking for colleagues so they could hunker down in their own little scrums and divide up the tasks on the ground at the other end.

  My own team – three other reporters and two pic men – made our way to a corner of the bar. A double whisky was set in front of me. Even in those hard-drinking newspaper days, I wasn’t accustomed to starting my day that way. ‘Drink it,’ one of my colleagues insisted. ‘Trust me, you’re going to need it before today’s over.’

  He was right. When we landed at Dublin, our Irish staff reporter gave us the grim news. More than forty dead. Because I’m a woman, because I was considered to be good with the grieving but also hard-headed enough to get what I’d come for, I was assigned to the death knocks – visiting the bereft families so we could flesh out our story with poignant quotes and photographs of the dead.

  I spent the rest of the day on the Coolock council estate, where many of the teenagers who died in the Stardust had come from. The families were in shock, but oddly grateful that someone wanted to mark the passing of their children. I’d never spent a more harrowing day at work. And I was just a spectator. My heart felt hollow when I imagined what the bereaved were going through.

  After the first edition deadline had passed, I met up with one of my team at the site of the fire. From the front of the building there wasn’t much to see except broken windows and smoke staining the upper part of the facade. Apart from the throat-catching stink of smoke and char, it was hard to believe forty-eight people had died and more than 240 had been injured there. It was the interior of the building that had been devastated by the fire; from the outside, the only giveaway was the number of fire engines and police vehicles crowding the roadway outside.

  Niamh Nic Daéid’s mother was one of those charged with finding out what happened inside the Stardust disco that night.

  The Valentine’s Dance at the Stardust was supposed to be a night to remember for very different reasons. Eight hundred and forty-one people, mainly in their late teens, had handed over the £3 entrance fee that entitled them to sausage and chips and the right to dance till two in the morning, thanks to a special late licence.

  Twenty minutes before closing, the DJ announced the winners of the best dancing prizes. A minute later, some revellers spotted smoke coming from behind a roller blind to the left of the dance floor. Most of them put it down to a special disco effect and kept dancing.

  Behind the blind were five rows of tiered cinema seats. When some of the dancers looked behind the blind they saw some of the seats on the back row ablaze. Their polyurethane stuffing was already emitting black clouds of extremely poisonous hydrogen cyanide. At first the fire was small and controllable, but it quickly grew in intensity. Employees emptied water extinguishers into the flames – to no avail. Within five minutes, molten plastic was dripping on to the patrons on the dance floor; part of the ceiling collapsed on to them; and thick, toxic smoke filled the entire ballroom. Survivors spoke of their shock at the swiftness of it all.

  Fire scene investigators at the scene of the Stardust Disco Fire, in which forty-eight people died and more than 240 were injured

  When people panic they instinctively try to leave a building the same way that they came in, so the narrow foyer leading to the Stardust’s main entrance quickly became a bottleneck. Those sprinting to the main doors found them locked shut and it took a bouncer crucial minutes to squeeze through the desperate crowd with the key.

  But still disaster should have been averted. There were six fire exits in the Stardust. But the owner, Eamon Butterly, had been worried about people opening the doors from the outside and slipping into the venue without paying, so one of the fire exits was locked and others had chains wrapped around them so they appeared locked. Panic-stricken patrons tried, and eventually managed, to kick these doors open. Another fire exit had tables and seats stacked on either side of it; yet another had plastic skips blocking it.

  At 1.45 a.m., when the ceiling in the ballroom collapsed and the electricity cut out, around 500 people were still inside. The blistering flames were their only source of light. The Adam and the Ants record that had been playing was replaced by terrified screams. Within nine minutes of the fire being spotted, everything in the Stardust was ablaze – seats, walls, ceiling, floor, tables, even metal ashtrays.

  In the mayhem, some people fled into the toilets. Six weeks before the disco, Butterly had heard customers were trying to smuggle alcohol in through the toilet windows, so he’d had steel plates welded to their inside, to complement the metal bars that were already in place outside. When fireman arrived at the scene, eleven minutes after the fire started, they attached cables to the bars and drove away at speed, but only managed to bend them. The people in the toilets were trapped in an inferno of flame and smoke.

  Everyone in the surrounding area, in the working-class communities of Artane, Kilmore and Coolock, knew someone affected by the tragedy. The whole of Ireland mourned the forty-eight killed. Five of the dead had been so badly burnt that they could not be identified. (In 2007 their bodies would be exhumed from a communal grave, so DNA analysis could sepa
rate and identify them.)

  At 8.35 on the morning of Valentine’s Day, Detective Garda Seamus Quinn inspected the gutted Stardust. He spent five hours examining the site, finding no trace of accelerants or electrical problems in the area where the fire had first been spotted. He also discovered, by throwing a lit cigarette on to a similar seat, that its non-flammable PVC covering did not catch fire. Had someone slashed a seat and deliberately lit its polyurethane filling?

  The British Fire Research Station carried out a full-scale reconstruction of the area where the fire had first been spotted at their hangar at Cardington, Bedfordshire. Investigator Bill Malhotra managed to get seats to catch light both by slashing them open, and by placing several sheets of newspaper underneath them. The flames reached the very low ceiling and started melting the carpet tiles, causing molten drops to fall on to other seats. Within the tight space all the seats heated up, and the boiling drops were enough to defeat their PVC coverings. Once five seats in the back row were in flames, the row of seats in front caught fire, too. Quinn’s and Malhotra’s experiments both suggested arson.

  In June 1982, eighteen months after the blaze, the Irish government published the results of a public inquiry into its origin and cause. On the question of why, the report was ambiguous. ‘The fire was probably caused deliberately,’ it said at one point. At another, ‘The cause of the fire is not known and may never be known. There is no evidence of an accidental origin and equally no evidence that the fire was started deliberately.’ The forensic experts who had given evidence were divided. While Quinn, Malhotra and one other thought the fire was most probably caused by arson, two others wouldn’t rule out an electrical fault.