The Nature of Life and Death

by Patricia Wiltshire

  Not so the next one. It was a two-up, two-down terraced house like the other one, but that was where the similarity ended. This one had new double-glazed windows and had been extended out toward the garden. A woman opened the door in a cloud of a strong, woody perfume and immediately one could tell she had money. She was expertly made up, with hair too blond to be blond, and smoking a cigarette. She was wearing black leather trousers, a black sweater, and several bright gold chains, neck to waist. Pink toenails peeped from her glittery mules and her long fingernails had been manicured into fashionable squares with white-painted tips. Several rings adorned her hands, including a large diamond cluster. The décor was a revelation—lush red carpet, black leather sofa and chair with fur cushions, and an elaborate crystal chandelier slung from the ceiling. The TV was as huge as a cinema screen and the little bar that had been squeezed into a corner was groaning with bottles of booze and glasses. The modernized fitted kitchen led outside into a sterile space of immaculately clean concrete slabs, with one or two tubs of dead flowers from last summer. There was nothing at either of these houses that resembled the vegetation where the body had been found. I had not expected there to be and could tell at a glance that there was no need of comparator samples and analysis from these places.

  I still had to counteract the inevitable claim by defense counsels that their clients regularly walked through woodlands all over Hampshire and Sussex. When you think about it pragmatically, and from your own experience, how many woodlands are likely to give a profile that would include those specific trees, shrubs, climbers, herbs, peculiar fungal spores and, on top of that, Solomon’s seal and a hay meadow, all in those proportions? From all the years of examining ground surface samples from a very wide range of places in the UK, I had never seen anything like it, and my gut feeling is that one does not exist. But one must play the court game of plugging holes of doubt.

  I was not familiar with the woodlands in the defined area but I knew a man who was. My teacher and continuing mentor from King’s College, London, Dr. Francis Rose, MBE, whom most British botanists revered because of his encyclopedic field knowledge, was the obvious oracle to consult. I took John with me. By this time, I had already analyzed the footwear and vehicle and had produced profiles that were very close to those of the comparator samples. I said, “Francis, do you know of any woodlands in this prescribed area that could yield these profiles?” I gave him my species lists and tables of proportional data. He sat back in his chair in his sitting room, which was stuffed with books, the table spread with plant specimens, pencils, his lens, and notebooks. He chewed the end of his pipe, scratched his beard, peered over his glasses in his usual, smiley, avuncular way, and stretched out to a bookshelf bearing lots of well-worn maps. After about an hour, and several cups of tea while squinting at Ordnance Survey maps covered in circles and scribbles, he picked out fourteen areas of woodland that he knew could be relevant. My heart sank at the enormity of the task ahead, whereas John, who had been transfixed by Francis, simply said, “Well, that’s it, then. We’ll start tomorrow, Pat.” We did too.

  We visited all fourteen woodlands but, just by looking at the vegetation of many of them, I was able to eliminate most, so the task was not as bad as it first seemed. They all had oak, beech, pine, and many of the other plants in my profiles, but only three came near to the plant community at the grave site. Even then, after analysis, none of the pollen and spore patterns gave a true picture of what I found at the grave, and what I had gleaned from the footwear and car. The unusual Solomon’s seal and the spectacular fungal spores were not found in the other sites either. I had thus satisfied myself that there was a strong similarity between the suspects and the grave site, whereas there were only weak similarities with the other sites. But an important question had yet to be answered: Had the victim been alive or dead when he was taken to that hole in the ground in that pretty glade of doom? I needed to work on his body to see what information it would reveal.

  There was no point in washing the hair because it had been exposed to the grave soil, but the turbinates might give us something. I arrived at the mortuary to find two glum-faced officers.

  “Sorry, Pat,” one of them said, “the mortuary staff put the cadaver in the freezer—he’s as solid as a frozen chicken.”

  They were anticipating my frowns of disbelief—why hadn’t they telephoned me before I left home?—but instead I simply asked, “Have you got a hair dryer?” and two were on the table within fifteen minutes. We all took turns in blowing hot air onto the victim’s skull and face. We were all bored because we knew it would take some time to defrost the skull, even though the brain had already been removed. I recall the macabre humor of the detective constable staring at me, with a poker face:

  “What did you do at work today, Daddy?”

  I nearly fell off my stool at this but, of course, jokes are not encouraged. The deceased must be treated with every respect and their dignity must be protected. We pulled ourselves together and, eventually, the head was in a good enough state for me to begin flushing out the turbinate bones. Obtaining palynomorphs from the body of a murder victim is no simple procedure.

  Picture, for a moment, the victim’s body laid out on a laboratory slab. In my earliest attempts to obtain palynological remains from a victim’s nasal cavity, I would enter through the nostrils, with a flexible tube attached to a large syringe of hot, dilute detergent water, reaching up and into the turbinates to flush the, hopefully, palyniferous membranes. The nose is only the visible part of a whole respiratory tract, and the nostrils lead directly into a cavity separated into two by a vertical partition, the septum. The nose’s principle function is to warm and moisten the air before it gets drawn down into our lungs, and to filter out any foreign particles along the way. Nostril hairs, the bane of so many aging men and disgust of so many women, help to prevent foreign material getting too far, but it is the large blood supply to the turbinate membranes that warms the inhaled air from the nostrils, while the layer of tiny beating cilia on the membrane surface trap and move any alien particles back down toward the nostrils, preventing them from entering the airways. Mucus is secreted throughout the respiratory tract from nostril to lung and this also helps to trap foreign particles. Yet, accessing the turbinates by the nostrils is awkward; and too often, unless the face and nostrils are impeccably clean, flushing with a catheter can result in the collecting water picking up contaminants. The nostrils can pick up any dirt and particulates, especially for a corpse where decay or putrefaction has set in, and the risk of contamination is high; and even the pathologist, in his routine washing of the body, can swill contaminants up into the nasal cavities.

  By now, I had modified and refined Szibor’s technique. In previous cases, wherever I could, I had been removing the nose, and sometimes the whole face so that I could get rid of extraneous material before flushing with my syringe. But I was still not happy. The method was too crude for my liking and, on advice from Sue Black, anatomist and anthropologist, I approached the turbinates in a different way.

  The body had been facedown in its woodland grave for as much as six weeks, and the whole head was naturally rimed with the soil and decaying leaf mulch that had filled the hole. Instead of going in through the nostrils and risking contaminating whatever I might find, I would take the advice I had been given and, flush the turbinates from the cribriform plate. The first time I ever saw this special plate of bone, perforated with little holes to allow the olfactory nerves to pass into the brain, I admired evolution. What a perfect little structure, sitting above the nasal cavity and separating it from the frontal lobes of the brain. To see it, however, meant that the top of the skull had to be removed as well as the skin of the head and face; these had been put back by the pathologist after removing the brain for examination. It is usually an easy job because it has already been removed once by the pathologist at the postmortem, and it merely involves gently lifting it away from the bone. At the end
of my work, I could easily replace it and no one would be the wiser.

  The most difficult part is always orienting the body such that the holes of the nasal passages are placed directly over my stainless steel kidney bowl, one of my prized possessions that I have had for over twenty years. Getting the corpse into position usually takes a great deal of effort and I invariably need the help of the mortuary technicians. I block off the throat with a wad of nonabsorbent cotton wool, then, punching a hole on the left side of the cribriform plate with a scalpel, I insert a syringe with about 20 milliliters of hot antimicrobial detergent solution (nothing more than my faithful servant, medicated shampoo) into the hole. As I gently flush, the solution gushes through the coral reef of delicate turbinate bones, taking any adhering particles with it, out into the bowl. I then repeat the process on the other side of the plate and pool the two sets of flushings into a single suspension. After mixing, the sample is divided into two, as insurance against one being lost, and both tubes are centrifuged to get a pellet of the particulates as plugs in the bottom of each one.

  Sometimes the particulates recovered are in such small quantities that they are barely visible to the naked eye in the bottom of the test tube—but, even then, the samples must be processed and studied. I have known cases where single particles have provided a vital point of difference, changing the complexion of how we understand the story. The small stuff matters—these samples represent the last breaths taken by the victim and might tell us where that was.

  The sample I had recovered from the victim’s turbinates was richer than I had imagined. My expectations had not been high. The number of palynomorphs retrieved from nasal passages are usually rather low; in many examinations I have conducted, cadavers have yielded fewer than ten grains for every 40 milliliters of solution washed through the turbinates. And yet, as I worked through the flushings I had recovered, the number kept rising—until, at the final count, we had identified 739 separate palynomorphs, belonging to 35 palynomorph taxa. What is more, the profile from the turbinates was very similar to the surface soil around the grave—but certainly not like that of the soil deeper down.

  Soil is remarkable. It is composed of part mineral and part organic material, and it is teeming alive with bacteria, fungi, and animals. Most of these are active in the top centimeter and, as the soil becomes deeper, both the number of organisms and their activity get less and less. At a depth of about 8 centimeters, the number of viable organisms drops away dramatically, and even more at about 20 centimeters. It is the same with palynomorphs. They are relatively abundant at the surface but, deeper down, they have been in the soil much longer with much more opportunity to decay. Thus, with depth, the number of pollen taxa usually diminishes and the grains themselves become thinned, corroded, and crushed. What I retrieved from the victim was all very well preserved—which meant it came from soil closer to the surface; this represented very recent pollen, probably that of the previous year.

  For soil particles to have been breathed up as far as his turbinate bones, he must have been breathing very heavily indeed. Just imagine having your face pushed into the soil surface and trying to breathe. You would eventually be gasping through your mouth and nose, inhaling with animal urgency. Now I was certain: this young man was struggling for breath as he was being garrotted. With his nose in the soil, he would not have been able to avoid breathing it high into his nasal passage, well beyond the nostrils. The pollen and spores could not have got there by taking a stroll through the woods, and if he had been garrotted back in Portsmouth, he probably would not have inhaled anything like the number. In any case, the pollen and spores in the nasal passages closely resembled the soil on the surface of the ground. I was near certain of it now: the woodland was the place of his murder. There was no other crime scene for the police to worry about.

  Sometime later, with both killers convicted and seeking reductions in their sentences, the confessions began. Each blamed the other for the murder. Each claimed that he had stood on in horror as the cord went around the man’s neck and the last breaths were choked out of him. The killer might have been sufficiently forensically aware to drive his van to a lonely spot and set it alight, destroying any evidence associated with it, but they were not aware enough to know that, as they dragged him into the woodland, it was leaving its own impression on them; and they did not know that, as the poor man lay there, with the garrotte around his neck and his face pressed into the graveside soil, he was breathing in the very particles of pollen and spores that would one day see them imprisoned for life.

  * * *

  —

  This case came up when I was teaching the Master’s in Archeological Forensic Science that I had proposed, set up, and coordinated at University College London, actually in the Institute of Archeology. Forensic archeology had been popular for some time, and Bournemouth University had set up a master’s course in the subject, with many young archeologists desperate to get involved with criminal investigations.

  I had taken up early retirement from the Institute because of increasingly poor health. Working out on sites in all weathers had proved just too much. I remember standing up to my thighs in a ditch full of freezing water one Christmas Eve. It was getting dark and I was shivering and yet hot. My head ached, my back ached, and it began to hurt when I breathed. By the time I got home, I was in the depths of pneumonia and it took me a very long time to recover. My doctor said that enough was enough, and that I could not go on punishing myself any longer.

  “You’ll just have to retire,” he said.

  “What?” I gasped. “I can’t do that, I have just too much to do!”

  I was distraught as I had, by now, a considerable number of very successful forensic cases behind me, and I was still learning and developing the skills that were needed to do my forensic discipline, and the courts, justice.

  The director of the Institute was a difficult man but he always seemed sympathetic toward me.

  “I’ll do you a deal,” he said. “You put on a master’s course and I’ll give you the lab and all the facilities to develop your forensic work. Just don’t go expecting a salary . . .”

  I thought that was a fantastic offer because I could be paid for any police work, it would not involve the heavy physical endurance needed for archeological fieldwork, and I would have the assistance and backup I needed. That is how the course came into being, and I look back on it mostly with pleasure—teaching the subjects that were close to my heart, and still doing casework. My fate seemed to be a teacher yet again.

  I was determined to make my course very wide-ranging and I involved specialists from many other fields to make it come alive. I set up a rota and the students took turns in accompanying me to crime scenes and the mortuary. That certainly sorted out the sheep from the goats; I was amused that it was the women who excelled, the males more often being rather feeble when it came to real-life experiences; well, real-death ones actually. I could write another book on my experiences running that degree course, about all the marvelous young people who followed me and the delights and disappointments that were the companions of teaching so intensely. My students had been exposed to the usual lectures and practical classes, but also to crime scenes, police stations, mortuaries, postmortems, and courts. It was certainly a varied and comprehensive course.

  CHAPTER 11

  “An Empty Vessel”

  Behind every strong and independent woman lies a broken little girl who had to learn how to get back up and never depend on anyone too much.” I do not know who wrote that—I just saw it on the internet—but it is so true in my case.

  Life in our village went on, as it had done for so many years before. My grandmother still stayed with us on her itinerant rounds. My lungs were still weak, giving in as frequently as ever to bouts of pneumonia, pleurisy, and bronchitis. My best friend and I had drifted away from each other in recent years, sent off to different grammar schools after the placement exams
, her to one in Monmouthshire close to our village, and me to one in foreign Glamorganshire. The school bus wound its convoluted way down the valley and around the villages to take us on the long ride to the drop-off on our side of the county divide. Never mind the weather, we then had to walk down a steep, winding road, cross over the Rhymney River bridge, and climb the longest, steepest hill to the strictest, most forbidding place one could ever imagine—Lewis School for Girls. We never questioned the hardship of that slogging trek once we got off the bus; we just endured it as children never would today.

  I soon made other friends including ones from Glamorganshire, most of us children of the coal-mining culture, whether our fathers were “real men” at the coalface or worked in the mines in some other capacity. The only concept of any class hierarchy we had was that gained by exam results. The community was passionate about education and fathers were blessed with the Miners’ Welfare Institutes to spend hours of quiet in the reading rooms. My father was one of the best-read people I knew and he could always hold a cogent argument on just about any topic. He taught me to argue too, and my mother found it impossible to cope with either of us when we were discussing some issue or other out of the newspaper. Argument is a good game, rather like fencing—thrust and riposte—the main rule being objectivity and detachment from the subject. I have always enjoyed listening to measured, intellectual argument, just as baroque music and the Dutch masters are my favorite art forms. Precision and detail have always hypnotized me.