The Nature of Life and Death

by Patricia Wiltshire

  While I was working away on the pollen, the police were doing inspired detective work. With the story of the girl’s disappearance dominating the news, her face emblazoned on every milk carton sold by the supermarket chain Iceland, two people contacted the police separately implicating the same man. They had both met him through a lonely hearts column, and he lived on the very same housing estate as the girl’s family. This suspect was just another ordinary man, according to his neighbors. He sold pet food for a living, regularly poached in the same woods where the girl’s body had been found, and kept himself to himself—but, as is so often the case, a banal exterior masked an altogether different kind of character. According to his past girlfriends, he had a sexual need for bondage, tying up his lovers and locking them in cupboards. To her horror, he had confessed to one of his past lovers that he wanted to bind her daughter in cable ties and have intercourse with her.

  All of this put this man firmly in the spotlight, but it was not yet enough for a police warrant to be issued. And, as detectives worked earnestly to uncover more than hearsay against him, there was still much I could do to advance the case. It was important to link the girl with this man, or link her with a place associated with him. Before 2008, the legal system in England and Wales stated that a defendant must be considered innocent until proven guilty “beyond reasonable doubt.” It is entirely the responsibility of the prosecution to prove guilt. This requirement still stands, but now the judge must instruct the jury that they “must be satisfied that they are sure the defendant is guilty.” The concept of “beyond reasonable doubt” is open to interpretation and, where my kind of trace evidence is involved, it is all too easy for a defense attorney to suggest that any palynomorph profile could have been acquired from some other place. It is interesting that nearly every time I have given evidence in some serious case or other, it becomes blatantly obvious that the attorney knows little about science and nothing about botany. Some have their juniors burning the midnight oil trying to construct questions that will catch me out but, because they just do not understand the implication of their questions, they are invariably easy to answer.*

  At last, the police had a breakthrough that allowed them to exercise a search warrant at the house of the pet food seller with a penchant for bondage. The leather dog collar which had fastened the black trash bag around the girl’s neck was found to have been manufactured by a company based in Nottingham. This company supplied more than two hundred retailers—and by painstakingly checking these one by one, detectives discovered that a mail-order company, based in Liverpool, had made three sales to addresses in the area where the murder had occurred. One of those sales was registered to this man’s address. This was the justification the police needed to enter his home and the garden behind it.

  I already knew what the police would find when they entered the garden. I had seen it in my mind’s eye. And when the police took me there, I recognized it. The garden was small, typical of the area, but what struck me immediately was the large damson tree with its canopy overhanging a great deal of the path. So this was where the plum/damson/cherry pollen had come from. Just to the left of the back door was a solitary hutch and I noticed movement. Oh, a lovely little ferret stared back at me with its kitten-like face pressed up against the mesh. My main concern now was the welfare of this poor, caged, little innocent who had been badly neglected during the whole operation. I refused to do anything else until I got a firm promise that the ferret was a priority. One thing I did notice immediately was the straw in the hutch—cereal pollen? In fact, there was quite a lot of straw strewn around the garden. The man had bred dogs and, to the left-hand side of the garden, was a succession of brick-built kennels, now derelict and fallen into disrepair, but they still had old straw scattered in them. Just a bit farther on there were the remains of a bonfire and, on a little farther still, was the garden boundary. It was separated from neighboring properties by a huge, out-of-control privet hedge and hanging over this were the lower branches of a poplar tree and the branches of an elder bush pushing through a gap. There were abandoned, scruffy flower beds that had most likely been planted with a range of garden flowers. Presumably, these would have accounted for the pollen I could not immediately identify, but that was of little importance now. It was enough to know that there was evidence of former cultivated garden plants.

  There were the remains of another bonfire toward the fence, on the opposite side of the garden to the first one, but I knew the girl’s hair had not been in contact with its ash. The vegetation at that side of the garden was decidedly different from the plants represented in her hair. There were also brambles rearing up and over the rubbish piled up on that side, and the whole area was being strangled by bindweed, with some stunted willowherbs poking through the tangled mass. If the girl had been close to them, there was a likelihood that they would be represented in her hair, but they were not. Those in my profile from the hair and the duvet cover were all around the first bonfire and the bottom of the privet hedge, under the poplar and elder. The abundant but stunted weeds, struggling in the compacted soil of the yard, were the ones in my pollen and spore profile. The most abundant were goosefoot, nettle, clover, cat’s ear, and sow thistle, the latter two accounting for my dandelion-type pollen. This side of the yard also had many other weeds, but they were less frequent over by the other bonfire remains because it was so overwhelmed and overshadowed by bindweed and bramble.

  There was little doubt in my mind that the girl and the duvet had been lying in this backyard for some time before she was buried. Her hair must have been falling loosely onto the ground. The comparator samples I subsequently took from the yard simply confirmed what our previous analysis had already demonstrated. There was a high likelihood that this was the garden and the specific part of that garden where the girl had lain.

  As I have already said, there are always anomalies. Perfection does not exist, in this or any other world. The garden had shown evidence of plants not represented in the profile—but this is to be expected, especially of wind-pollinated taxa. Nothing is ever 100 percent accurate in forensic ecology, but, combined with the dog collar, the evidence I had provided was strong enough for the killer to confess his guilt. It spared his victim’s family the agonies of criminal process and reliving her last moments in court, but I was confident that, even if he had claimed innocence, the palynological contribution was strong enough to move any court case toward a conviction.

  As it was, his story transformed several times; first, it was an accident that he was compelled to cover up; then it was an impulse killing that not even he understood. First, he had buried her in the forest immediately after having killed her; but then he came out with a version that felt perilously close to the truth, and one that the palynomorphs had been telling us all along: after the murder, and with no place else to hide the body, he had wrapped it in the trash bag and the cotton cover, and hidden it beneath pallets in his back garden. Her hair must have spilled out onto the ground, picking up all the pollen I had found in it. Perhaps that drove him to put her head in a trash bag and secure it with the first thing to come to hand—one of his dog collars. Perhaps he could not bear to look at her face but there was no explanation of why her body had been so well preserved and, as many villains are also liars, would anyone believe him anyway? The privet, poplar, elder, damson, goosefoot, nettle, spores of Sphagnum moss, and alien garden plants I did not even have to identify whispered to us of where she had spent her last lonely hours, and helped in the conviction of the man who killed her.

  CHAPTER 8

  Beauty in Death

  For some years, I lived with my grandmother and her elderly cousins in their grand home in Rhyl, in North Wales. There were large eaves formed by the roof overhang, and these were a haven for wildlife. I was used to the chittering and fluttering sounds of bats roosting under them and, on one warm, balmy night, I had my first close encounter with one. It was a particularly hot summer, and the bedroom wi
ndow was wide open, with the curtains drawn partly back. I was startled awake by my grandmother flapping around the bedroom with a rolled-up magazine in her hand, seemingly hitting out at nothing. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and was startled to see that she was chasing a bat. The poor little thing had unwittingly come through the window but was now soaring in blind arcs around the bedroom, skimming at incredible speed between and around obstacles, the most potent one being the weapon in my grandmother’s hand. In her diminutive grasp, the rolled-up paper was as strong as any wooden truncheon. She took a fatal swing and the bat dropped out of the air above my bed. Stunned or dead, I did not know. In a flash, she picked it up and tossed it out of the window.

  Relieved, she came back to the warmth of the huge double bed we shared and was soon asleep. As I lay awake beside her, I was upset. Why did she kill anything she didn’t like? Nowadays I know that, being born and bred in Australia—where anything and everything might kill you—she could never take the risk of leaving something as alien as a bat flying around our bedroom. She was probably convinced it would suck our blood as we slept.

  Immediately after breakfast, and as quickly as I could, I ran around the house to just below our bedroom window. There lay the bat, still—dead. I knelt down to touch it, slightly fearful for I had never been close to one before. Its fur was a wonder of softness. I lifted its wing and its little clawed foot hooked onto the end of my finger. I was fascinated to learn, just by looking, that the bat’s wing was actually a “hand.” Instead of feathers, the wings were of very fine, thin, dark leather stretched between its long, slender fingers. This animal was very beautiful, and its death made me cry. But I cradled it inside, wrapped my clean socks around it, and hid it in the drawer by the side of the bed. I had spent the past weeks studiously teaching myself to knit, so I ran to my wool bag, unpicked a knitted square that had taken me an age to make, and carefully wound the pale blue wool around and around the little corpse until it was cocooned like a mummy. There followed a solitary cortege to a quiet part of the Fuchsia hedge, where I buried the body under a mass of scarlet, pendulous blooms, digging out the soft soil with a spoon I had hidden in my pocket. I have never forgotten that wanton waste of a lovely little animal’s life and, for the first time, looked upon my grandmother, Vera May, as being less than perfect.

  What happened to that bat as it lay in its woolen shroud, three inches under the earth, is similar to what will happen to us all. The romance of death, so saturated in the art and poetry of bygone days, is so false. One day, you and I will both be the same as the bat: just lifeless flesh, blood, and bone, and the wonderfully intricate workings of the body will just stop—dead.

  I was born in a time and place where we did not question the existence of God or the worth of religion. As a girl, I was a regular chapel-goer and did not question that Jesus Christ had died for our sins. No one else seemed to doubt it either. If you were good, you went to heaven and if you were bad, you went to hell. But the multiplicity of colors in life experiences fueled my rejection of such simple, black-and-white ideas. I slowly began to realize that life is difficult, complicated, and certainly unfair, and I could see no logical reason for an afterlife where I might exist in perpetuity. Logically, the only afterlife is the handing on of one’s genes to offspring; but, one can still attain immortality through leaving one’s writing, art, or music. I came to believe that there is no soul eternal and, although my conversion was gradual and obscure, I know I will end this life as a committed, perhaps even fundamentalist, atheist. I firmly believe that we exist because of chemistry and physics, and our physical being will be recycled in the same way as it always has been.

  Your body is your own for only a short time; the elements from which it is made are only borrowed from the outside world, and you must give them back eventually. The entity that you recognize as you is a collective of ecosystems that many different types of microorganisms call home. And although you might die—when your brain and circulatory systems have irrecoverably stopped working—the communities of bacteria and fungi, and even mites in your pores and worms in your gut (if you have any), will live on for some time.

  Soon after your blood ceases to flow, your body will cool until it reaches the ambient temperature of the place where you died. These environmental conditions will have a significant bearing on what is to come. The blood in your capillaries and veins, no longer being pumped around by the beating of your heart, will settle and pool, leading to the first discoloration of your skin, a phase called livor mortis, and, after that, your muscles will inevitably stiffen, first in the face and then in the entire body, as your muscle filaments begin to bind together. This is the phase referred to as rigor mortis.

  Your body will not die all at once. Starved of oxygen, your brain will stop functioning within three to seven minutes, but it can take the rest of your body a number of hours to catch up. Your skin will still be capable of being cultured in a laboratory, and coerced to grow twenty-four hours after your brain has ceased all function. It is deep inside you that the most dramatic changes are being wrought. For the millions of microorganisms that have colonized your insides, supporting the proper functioning of your body, and in particular your gut, will transform everything. Now that your heart is not beating and your lungs are not breathing, together spreading oxygen to every cell in your body, those microorganisms inside you that depend on oxygen will rapidly use up all that is left. They will fill your body with carbon dioxide and other gases, and begin to poison your body’s cells. Your own cells will release enzymes that break down your tissues in a process of self-digestion, or “autolysis.”

  Meanwhile the anaerobic microorganisms—the ones that not only function without oxygen, but are poisoned by it—thrive and multiply. As your cells break down, the bounty for these anaerobes is immense. They proliferate wildly, the sheer mass of their growth inexorably forcing its way through your blood vessels, which provide a convenient system of tubes, ramifying throughout every tissue and organ. They use you as food, taking the energy and nutrients from your proteins, carbohydrates, and every complex compound in your body and, in doing so, produce noxious acids and gases, and many other by-products of their metabolism. Foul-smelling gases, such as hydrogen sulfide, blacken the peripheral blood vessels and contribute to the fetid smell of death. This “putrefaction” is when your body will lose the threads that hold it together, when the cohesiveness between its cells melts away, and your tissues and organs turn to mush.

  Decomposition is not a constant thing. The variables that dictate its processes are many and varied and, the truth is, we are still in the dark about so much of it. My work has revealed time and time again that, just as in life, no two of us are the same; we are very different in death too. Some bodies decay slower than others. If you were on a course of antibiotics when you perished, it is likely that your decomposition will take a relatively long time: those same antibiotics you were taking to treat a chest infection have been killing and suppressing the bacteria and microorganisms not only in your chest, but in your gut too. If your gut bacteria and other residents have been cleared out by your medication, they will not be there to decompose you inside out.

  The temperature of the landscape in which you died, or where you were left to rot; the moisture in the atmosphere around you; how loosely or tightly your clothes fit around you when you are laid out to decay; whether you are buried in a shallow grave of topsoil or a deeper grave of densely packed clay, or even a grave of dry, sandy earth; all of these things have a bearing on the rate at which your body disappears. Attempts are being made all the time to ascertain what speeds up or slows down decomposition but, the fact is, there are so many factors affecting the process, it is dangerous to infer too much without knowing more about the conditions that prevail while it is happening. Sometimes, even bodies interred in the very same graveyard—where the conditions seem near identical—can decay at different rates, and nobody truly knows why.

  In 1998, whe
n the local doctor Harold Shipman from Hyde, near Manchester, was arrested on suspicion of murdering his patients, nobody could have predicted the litany of horrors and secrets that were about to be revealed. Shipman was eventually imprisoned for life on 15 counts of murder—but an inquiry went on to identify 218 separate victims and predicted that, across his career, he was likely to have been responsible for more than 250 unlawful deaths. The inquiry demanded that a number of Shipman’s victims be exhumed from their graves for close examination, and the postmortem pictures I saw were astounding. I remember the strong image of an embalmed gentleman, still dressed in his evening suit and bow tie; he had been in the ground for many years but was still intact and quite recognizable. One wonders whether, because of the strength of the embalming fluid that had been pumped into his veins in the undertaker’s mortuary, he would ever disappear or whether he would last for thousands of years, like an Egyptian mummy. The contents of the other exhumed coffins varied; some contained very little at all, even though the victims may have been buried long after some that were still quite well preserved. It was fascinating and puzzling.

  The progress and timing of human decomposition is becoming a very fashionable area of research in some universities. It is certainly popular with students who enroll in anthropology courses and have dreams about being known throughout the police forces as “the” expert to consult. Certainly, it would be useful to be able to predict how long someone had been dead just by their stage of decomposition, but the multifarious nature of the process means that it might be impossible ever to construct a universal and predictable model.