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Sue Black

Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, University of Dundee

Sue Black grew up in idyllic surroundings on the west coast of Scotland, where her parents managed a hotel. An incident during a dustmen’s strike when she was a child had a critical influence on her life and career. She watched her father beat a rat to death with a stick as it rummaged in the overflowing garbage bags behind the hotel. ‘I could see its tail lashing, I could see its eyes, and I could hear it growling. And from that point onwards I’ve had an absolute and utter morbid fear of rodents,’ she says. It even determined the choices she made in studying anatomy at university. Today Sue Black is one of a tiny community of forensic anthropologists in the UK. An expert at Disaster Victim Identification, she has worked for the International War Crimes Tribunal in Kosovo, the United Nations in Sierra Leone and the UK government in Iraq, and following the 2004 tsunami in Thailand.

Sue Black lives with her family in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, and admits it is sometimes hard to balance what is often a dangerous, though compulsively fascinating, job with the responsibilities of motherhood.

When I went to university I had no idea what I wanted to do eventually, except that it had to be something vaguely biological. At the end of second year the only two subjects I was any real good at were anatomy and botany. I went to see both tutors, and the botanist – bless his heart – was the most boring person on earth. I thought, ‘I can’t name and draw plants for the rest of my life. I can’t! I’ll do anatomy.’ So I went into anatomy.

The third year was dissection and I absolutely loved dissection. But in fourth year you had to do a research project, and they all involved things like ‘lead level in the rat brain’, ‘carcinomas in the hamster pituitary’… and nothing could persuade me to lift a dead rodent out of a bucket. It’s a complete and utter, illogical fear because of my father. So I told the tutor, ‘Look, I can’t do mice, rats, hamsters – can’t do them alive or dead.’ And she said, ‘Well, we can put a project together on human bone; how about that?’ Perfect! As long as it didn’t involve a rodent, I was happy.

So I did my honours project in the identification of human bone. Then my head of department, John Clegg, said, ‘We’ve got some money if you want to do your PhD here.’ So I’ve fallen into it the whole way along – which is a nightmare for any school that’s trying to use you as a career model!

I did my PhD, and then a very dear friend of mine, Louise Scheuer, contacted me to say there was a vacancy in the department she worked in at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. It was a fairly aggressive interview panel, but there were two people who wanted somebody in the post who could teach anatomy. At that time there were so many people in anatomy departments who couldn’t teach anatomy: they were cell biologists, biochemists, etc. The head of department then was Michael Day and his final question to me was, ‘If I needed you to go into my dissecting room this afternoon to teach, could you do it?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course I could,’ and that sealed it.

So I started lecturing at St Thomas’. One day Iain West, the forensic pathologist, phoned the anatomy department and said, ‘I’ve got some bones; does anybody up there know anything about bones?’ I was sent down, and the most miserable policeman was standing there. He looked me up and down and you could see him thinking: ‘Slip of a girl, what’s she gonna know?’ But we took the bones and put them in a plastic bag. They’d been found in a rubbish tip and were suspected to be a missing person. We put the plastic bag on the radiator and left the bones there for about 10 minutes, then I opened the bag and stuck it under his nose and said, ‘What can you smell?’ He said, ‘That smells like roast lamb,’ and I said, ‘Exactly. They’re sheep bones.’ And he was so impressed, this policeman, that he’d got it right that next time there were some bones he said, ‘Oh, I’ll have that woman from anatomy.’ So I just started doing more and more of the bones work around London, and then ended up doing work for the Foreign Office. It just sort of spiralled from there.

And what did you learn about bones? What can you tell from bones?

When you’re given a pile of bones – it might be something to do with the World Trade Center; it might be the London bombings – the first thing is: are they human or not? It’s easy to tell if you’ve got a skull. But if it’s a tiny bit of bone from a finger or something …

You’ve got to bear in mind that with things like the World Trade Center, there were restaurants, so there was beef, pork, lamb in the remains. When the London bombs went off there were people carrying shopping – you know, they had Sainsbury’s chickens and things. Or there would be cats or dogs in the tunnel. So you’ve got to separate out: is it human or not? Once we’ve established it is a person, we might be asked, ‘How long has this person been dead?’ Because if it’s more than 70 years before the current date, then it’s no longer a forensic case, it’s technically archaeological.

Literally? That’s the cut-off point?

Yes. It’s man’s ‘three score years and ten’, and if it’s a murder case the chances of the perpetrator still being alive are, of course, slim, so there’s little technically for police to investigate. You will always get cases that won’t fall neatly into that category. For example, if you find children’s remains on Saddleworth Moor, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s 100 years from now, they will still possibly be the Moors Murders. Certain cases have a notoriety.

So, is it human? How long has it been dead? And then, what more can I tell? Are you male or female? How old were you when you died? It’s much easier to assign an age to a child than to an adult, because children go through a phase of quite regular growth, so that you can go into Marks & Spencer and buy a pair of trousers for a six-year-old. You can’t buy them for a 42-year-old. Because growth and age are so closely related in a child, we can get very close. With a fetus, you can identify age to within weeks. With a young child it’s to within months, and with an older child it’s to within a year or so. By the time you reach puberty it’s to within a couple of years. But once all the growth changes have stopped, then the human body goes through a stage of maintenance, in the twenties. So if a body is in a maintenance phase we can say that person is in their twenties. But beyond the twenties – unfortunately it seems very young – everything’s degenerative. And some of us will degenerate quicker than others, so it becomes very unreliable to assign an age if you’re over 30.

So, we have to assign a sex; we have to assign an age. We can then assign a height. Height’s not very useful for separating people unless you’re exceptionally tall or exceptionally small. Then the fourth indicator of biological identity is your race. But race is such a contentious issue, for a number of reasons. It’s also a fact that we have such an admixture between the races that it’s very, very difficult.

So that’s the first thing we’ll produce: a biological profile that says, he’s male, aged between 25 and 30, 5ft 6 to 5ft 8 tall, white. Then you want to establish the personal identity. What information can you take from these remains that will separate two individuals with an identical biological profile? When it comes to DVI – Disaster Victim Identification – we have four principal means of identification: dental work, DNA, fingerprints and any unique medical condition, such as a hip replacement or a pacemaker with a unique serial number.

But that’s not really forensic anthropology. Dental records are the odontologist; DNA is the forensic biologist; fingerprints are the fingerprint officer, and unique medical conditions are the pathologist. What does that leave for the anthropologist? In many ways we get the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel. We know our position! That is, if you can’t get identity by any other means, come back to the anthro.

So do you generally work as a team with these other people, or are you just called in after everybody else?

Depends on the situation. If we’re working on a deployment for DVI, we will be part of a team. If it’s a case where the police bring in a bone to you, then you’re on your own, because basically they’ve decided that pathologists can’t do anything; they can’t get any DNA out of it. And so it’s all about trying to establish biological identity.

For example, we had a case in Scotland where a middle-aged woman went missing, and her husband’s plea was that she’d gone down south to support a friend who had marital difficulties. But the trouble was that this woman, every night of her life, had phoned her elderly parents at the same time, and she’d stopped doing it at that point. That change in behaviour is an indication that something’s wrong. So the ‘scene of crimes’ people went to the house; they found some blood in the bathroom; they found a chipped piece of her tooth in the U-bend of the bath. But that doesn’t mean she’s dead. She could have gone into the bathroom, tripped, cracked her chin on the bath … But they found her blood on the door of the washing machine, and in the filter they found a tiny fragment of bone no bigger than about 10mm long, maybe 4 or 5mm wide. And that’s all they had. DNA showed it was this missing person. But the question was: which part of her is it? Because if it’s a bit of her finger she could still be alive, but if it’s something more critical, then we’re in a different story.

We could identify that that tiny fragment came from the left greater wing of the sphenoid bone, which is around your temple. That’s the only place in the whole body that fragment could come from. So then you can confront her husband and say, ‘This is a bit of her skull, and it’s found in the washing machine … We need an answer.’ He changed his plea. He said that they’d had an argument, she’d run out the back door, tripped on the top step, cracked her head on the patio and died. He stated that he’d picked her up, which is how her blood and bone got on his clothing, put her in the bath, which is how her blood and her tooth got in the bath, wrapped her in plastic and dropped her body in the local river. We’ve never found the rest of her body. All we’ve ever had of this missing person is this tiny fragment of bone.

And was there a conviction?

Absolutely. The pathologist’s testimony in court stated that it couldn’t have been a single blow because the bone fragment was dislodged on to his clothing, and when he put his clothes into the washing machine, that’s how the bone got into the filter. He was convicted of manslaughter. So we’ve no idea, when we get a tiny fragment of bone – it may go absolutely nowhere, but it may lead to a conviction for manslaughter.

When you started in this field, were there people with this kind of experience who could teach you, or have you pushed at the boundaries of knowledge as you’ve gone along?

A bit of both. There’s always been a very good relationship between anatomy and forensic matters, but it was never a formal relationship. My PhD supervisor was interested in bone, so that was useful. And she was an exceptionally good anatomist, so we kind of learnt together and tried to keep up with the latest developments. Then when I moved to St Thomas’ Louise Scheuer was there, who’s also an exceptionally gifted anatomist who was interested in bone. So I always had strong women around who had the kind of information I could ‘feed off’ and develop. But there was no formal training; you couldn’t do a degree in forensic anthropology in the UK.

Things really changed around the end of the 1990s, when suddenly forensics became sexy and you had forensic courses being set up in universities across the country. Suddenly people were becoming teachers in forensic anthropology, who’d never done a case in their lives and who were learning it one step ahead in the textbook. I have some sympathy with that because in the early stages I wasn’t that much different. But within the last 10 to 15 years there has been a huge change in the professionalism of the discipline. And, of course, international and national judicial scrutiny is such that we have to know what we’re doing – we can’t play at it any more.

So did you actually set out to become a forensic anthropologist?

In my heart of hearts, I’m an anatomist. But the work just kept coming, and the big turning point for me was Kosovo. At that time I was working with Peter Vanezis, the forensic pathologist in Glasgow, and Peter was deployed with the British forensic team to Kosovo in 1999, very shortly after the Serbs retreated. He found himself faced with a crime scene that was an outhouse with 42 co-mingled bodies very badly decomposed: partly buried, partly burnt and partly gnawed by dogs. He said, ‘I don’t know how to do this, but I know somebody who does.’ So at that point forensic anthropology became a subject within UK deployment.

And you were the first person to do it?

Yup … I went out to Kosovo about a week after the main team, and it was just, you know, ‘How the heck do you do this?’

Had you ever had anything like that?

No, no. It had always been one or two little fragments at a time – a house fire, that sort of thing. But I was working alongside the Anti-Terrorist Branch, SO13, at the time, and these are hugely experienced officers. And with Peter Vanezis, who’s a very experienced pathologist, we got through it all together, and sort of learnt it stage by stage. And Britain is very firmly entrenched within its forensic credentials, so absolutely everything was done to an evidential standard we knew would stand up to scrutiny.

Before we explore Kosovo further, I want to hear a bit about your early life. I understand your grandmother was particularly important …

That was my father’s mother, and I spent a lot of time with her. She was one of these amazing ladies who could interact with a four-year-old as easily as she could with an 18-or 50-year-old. And she always had time, which I think is the most important thing any grandparent can have, because your own parents are so busy. She was the most adorable woman, she really was. She died when I was 15. She knew she was dying of lung cancer because she’d smoked a horrendous number of cigarettes throughout her life. She told me she was going to die, and I remember being very upset. But she did what is probably one of the cruellest things you can do: she said, ‘But I’ll never leave you! For the rest of your life I’ll be sitting on your left shoulder to keep the devil away, and any time you need advice, you’ve just got to listen and you’ll know what’s the right thing to do.’ [laughing]

And has she been there?

Oh, it’s the bane of my life! There are so many times I’ve wanted to do something, and I find myself turning my head [looking at her shoulder] and thinking, ‘No, she wouldn’t be proud of me if I did that.’ And I know that when the time comes, I’ll actually have to face her, so I’ve got to get it right. What an awful burden to give your grandchildren! But she was a wise, pithy old lady and there was a huge hole when she died. She’s seen me through all sorts of things, you know.There have been some horrendously difficult times, but she’s still there – 35 years later.

As a woman doing science, have you ever found yourself at a disadvantage?

Never. Any time that I’ve worked with the police … In Kosovo, for example – you’re out there with a team of 18 men; you’re the only woman; there’s no toilet, so when you want a pee 18 men all have to look away. Never once has any one of them made me feel uncomfortable because I’m female. They are, in many ways, more protective.

One of the most disruptive things you can do for policemen is to have a young, blonde, available female on the team. You need a mother figure. They respect you for that, and they’ll protect you.

So you’ve found that role has fallen to you?

Oh, absolutely. They want to talk about their families, about the things they see, and how they feel about it. They want to talk to someone who’s not going to be a threat, and I think it’s a huge compliment that they’re prepared to do that, because policemen don’t give personal information very easily. But they’ve never, in any negative way, treated me differently because I’m a woman. And coming to Dundee, being a woman hasn’t made any difference whatsoever. If you can do the job and achieve the goals, then you’re the same as everybody else.

Back to Kosovo – what were the challenges?

Well, the first challenge was the first site – those 42 men who had been herded into an outhouse. The gunmen had stood at the door and sprayed it with Kalashnikov fire. The chap who managed to get into the corner first was a survivor, and it’s important for an indictment that you have one. The gunmen’s accomplices stood at the windows, threw in straw, and torched the place, so that when we arrived all the bodies were huddled into one area because they’d been trying to get away. There had been six months of decomposition, so there was very little recognisable soft tissue left. ‘Big, boiling masses of maggots’ is the only way to describe it. Partly burnt, and dogs had gone in and taken away bits for food.

Our job was to document the evidence. If this is going to be an indictment site against Milošević, then the witness statement has to match up with the forensic evidence. If what the witness is saying is not borne out by the evidence, or vice versa, then that’s not going to be a site that’s likely to lead to conviction. So we literally had to start at the door of the building, on our knees, sifting fingertip through every piece of rubble. Once you got to what was a part of a body, or you could perhaps outline as a whole body, then you would lift it, take it away and do the post-mortem on what was left. Again, it’s about establishing: is this male or female? How old? How tall? Is there any clothing or documentation? And literally working your way through that room until you’ve cleared it – bearing in mind that there might be explosive ordnance there as well.

I was going to say, what were the dangers?

We had an explosive device left for us at that scene. You have to make things funny – it’s not at the expense of the deceased people, but it’s what keeps you going in these difficult situations. There was a tree next to the crime scene, and we’d use that tree when we needed to take care of bodily functions. The first person to do that was one of the Anti-Terrorist Branch explosive ordnance officers. He came back beaming from ear to ear, and said, ‘I’ve found a device!’ They’d planted a device near the tree, with a trip wire so that when we walked down the path it would go off. And he was so delighted, first because he’d found something to do, but secondly because he’d actually been relieving himself on to the device and he was really impressed that he could still stop peeing in mid-flow at his age!

We had to blow up that device. And we had grenades that were placed underneath bodies with the pin removed, so that when you lifted the body the grenade would go off. You’d find razor blades, hypodermic needles in pockets, things that would inflict pain.

And how did you deal with witnessing such horror and such obvious cruelty?

Well, by that point I’d probably done 10 or 15 years of forensic work. I might not have seen anything on that scale, but it’s the same principle. To work in forensics you need a clinical detachment, because you’re there primarily to retrieve evidence. If you do become affected by it, you become inefficient in your objectivity. So you actually close down emotionally. Where it kind of breaks through is when you’re really tired, when you’re really hot – you know, when there are other stresses. Then sometimes it can boil over, but the majority of the time it doesn’t.

I think anatomists learn this gradually as they’re exposed to the human body. The first case I went to was a microlight pilot who went down off Inverbervie. He was a decapitated torso. I did that case with my supervisor. You become more and more able to cope with things that are difficult. But what you don’t forget is that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder can hit you any time. It may never hit you. It may be tomorrow, it may be a month, a year or even 10 years, so you have to be aware of it. But I can say, with my hand on my heart, I’ve never had the flashbacks or the lack of sleep …

In Kosovo did you have the relatives around, and does that unnerve you?

We didn’t on that particular occasion, because we were so close to the time when the Serbs had retreated that the refugees hadn’t started coming back. But they did very quickly after that, so we soon began to get onlookers. These were the relatives, neighbours, friends, and that adds an extra dimension, because the last thing you want is to add to their grief. So you take on board the responsibilities of your own job and the added responsibility of dealing with people who’ve gone through things we can only imagine.

Often it’s very humbling. They felt they had to give you something, so they’d come with a cup of coffee, or cold water, and that was almost more difficult because they were thanking you for what you were doing.

But the one that will stick in my mind forever was a man who lost his entire family. A rocket-propelled grenade took out his trailer and on the trailer were his wife, his mother, his sister-in-law and their eight children. They were all literally blown apart. He retrieved as much as he could and buried them, which is a tremendously brave thing to do … To be able to go round and pick up what’s left of your family, from an 18-month-old baby to your twin 14-year-old sons. And then we come along and say, ‘Look, the UN has identified this as a potential indictment site; we’d like to exhume what you buried. Are you okay with it?’

We don’t have to get consent, because a UN indictment would override that, but it’s always best. He said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘What I want more than anything is 11 body bags. I need to put every one of my family into the ground with a name, because it’s the only way God can find them. At the moment they’re all together, and I need God to find my daughter; I need God to find my wife; I need God to find my mother …’

What we brought in filled a body bag and a half. That was all we could find, so there was huge pressure. I actually sent everybody out of the mortuary for the day and said, ‘I’ve got to do this one myself,’ because juvenile identification is my area of expertise. So I laid out 12 sheets along the floor of the mortuary and, going through the material I had, I started to separate little bits out … You know, ‘That can’t be the five-year-old, so is it the eight-year-old or the six-year-old?’ By the time I’d done all that, we had something that I was absolutely happy represented each of the 11 people. But there were two 14-year-old boys, and all I had of them were arms, and they were pretty much bare bone by that point. I couldn’t separate them because they were both male and the same age. One of them had a Mickey Mouse vest attached to it. I said to the policeman, ‘Go and ask the father which of his children had a Mickey Mouse vest.’ He came back with the name of one of the twins, and I thought: that’s all we need.

We gave him back 12 body bags at the end of that day – the twelfth bag was what we couldn’t separate. It would be very tempting just to split that between the bags on the principle ‘He’ll never know.’ But that’s not the point. She [meaning her grandmother on her shoulder] won’t allow me to do that, because at the end of the day the man wants to be sure that in that bag is his wife; in that bag is his daughter …

It mattered very much to him, but it also matters to the courts because they could come along and say, ‘Right, open up that body bag.’ If what’s in that bag doesn’t equate to the named missing person you’ve said it is, then you’re not a credible witness, and every bit of evidence you’ve recovered can be discounted. You can’t afford to do that.

So we gave him back 12 body bags. And it was the most humbling experience of my life to hear him say, ‘Thank you.’ You think: God, for what he’s been through this is the absolute least we could do.

So are there temptations to do a little bit extra for the family, or for the police, or are the limits of your responsibility very clear?

It is generally very clear. Most of the time we don’t have involvement with the family, because you can’t afford to be influenced by their emotion and their situation. So most of our work is in clinical isolation. And you go the full 110% on everything you do, whether it’s for the police, the courts, the family or whoever, it doesn’t matter. But when the family element comes in, then you do end up, I think, going that extra little bit that you possibly shouldn’t. But you can’t not.

In a place like that you were probably working very long hours with little sleep – how on earth do you look after yourself?

If you’re the only anthro on the team and you haven’t looked after yourself and they need an anthro, then you shut that team down. So there’s a huge responsibility to look after yourself – to make sure that if you cut yourself you deal with it properly; if you get a tummy upset you deal with it properly, you drink enough water.

We also have a buddy system where you take responsibility for somebody else, who equally takes responsibility for you. If you start to see erratic behaviour, then you can pull them aside and say, ‘We need to talk.’ You’ll do that for them, and they’ll do that for you.

Also, part of the role of the senior officer in charge is welfare. We didn’t have that in the early stages of Kosovo, so we did work far, far too many hours. It became clear that people were going to burn out quickly, and the senior officer said, ‘No, today we’re doing nothing. We’re going to sleep late and eat well. You can read a book, phone home, do whatever you like, but we’re not working today.’ That becomes very important, but you can’t do that in all circumstances – it depends on the nature of the deployment. If you’re going in somewhere that’s particularly dangerous you may have a very tight time schedule, and then you don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘We’re not working today.’

What keeps you going?

It’s the detective in all of us, isn’t it? Our mystery is: who was this person? And when you solve that, it’s a huge adrenaline rush. You think, ‘Yup, someone’s got their husband back. Someone’s got their wife, their daughter … I’ve made a difference.’ Even if it’s not going to make a difference to the courts, it’ll make a difference to somebody. And that’s grand …

Working in a big team in Kosovo was a bit like Big Brother. You take a bunch of people that wouldn’t normally choose each other; you throw them into a really difficult situation; you throw stresses at them – lack of sleep, lack of food – you make them work together. And yep, there are times when you will shout at somebody, lose your temper, but you know you’ve got to live with them again, so you get over it. It can be quite an experience! But the camaraderie you develop is hugely strong. And these are the people you can talk to, because, when nobody else will understand, they do.

The police brought some counsellors to Kosovo. And I mean, bless their hearts, they tried! But they never understood why we couldn’t take them seriously. Because they’d never worked with us, they didn’t know what we were doing.

So is this where the buddy thing came in – they suddenly realised you needed someone who knew the situation?

Yeah, absolutely. You’ll sit down at night with a beer, and you’ll just talk. But to have a counsellor come in and say, ‘Tell me how you feel,’ you think: for goodness’ sake, I’ve been here for 12 weeks – how the hell d’you think I feel? It can be counterproductive if you haven’t got the right counsellors.

In buddying each other, can you admit weakness?

Oh, absolutely. We had an officer out with us one time … We had been exhuming bodies in a field. It was miles from anywhere, so we couldn’t take the bodies back to the mortuary; we had to do the post-mortems on a sheet laid out in the field. This was a group of women and children that had been massacred, and they were really in a dreadful state. We’d just exhumed the body of a little girl and she was still wearing her sleep suit and her little red wellies. One of the officers made a mistake – the little girl was about the same age as one of his own, and he put his daughter’s face in his own mind on to this. I was working with the pathologist, and I looked up and thought: why’s there a row of policemen looking at me? Then I saw that behind them was this officer who was falling apart: it was the men’s way of giving him his moment of privacy and time to get over it.

So I took my gloves off, took my suit down and tied it round my waist, went over and gave him a huge hug. He broke apart, and he could then talk to me afterwards. We sat and we drank beer together that evening, and by the following morning he said, ‘Och, I shouldn’t have done that. I’ll never do it again, because it’s not my daughter.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not,’ you know? So you’ve just got to look out for it …

Going back to the beginning when you first did anatomy, how difficult did you find it? Were you ever squeamish apart from the rats?

When I was at school I had a Saturday job in a butcher’s shop, so from the age of 13 I’d dealt with cold, red meat. I’ve never been squeamish about carcasses, or cutting up meat. It’s natural. And to dissect a human body, to be able to look underneath the skin, is the most fascinating thing. It’s a real privilege to be able to see what we’re like inside. There’s nothing ghoulish about it. We’re all fascinated by bodies.

You were the first in your family to go to university, but how much support did your mum and dad give you over the years?

My mother was enormously proud. She had a scrapbook, bless her, of everything I’d ever done. My father is proud too, but he can never tell you. He’s an ex-regimental sergeant major, classic Scotsman, and he finds demonstration of affection really difficult. But I know how much he cares.

How easy is it to take off your white coat, go home and be a mum at the end of the day?

Oh, easy. It’s just the other side of the coin. There’s only one occasion where I made a mistake, and I made a really big mistake. I have three daughters: 23, 12 and 10. I’d just come back from Iraq and had done a radio programme. I hadn’t heard the final piece, but my husband had recorded it for me, and I went to listen. Grace, my middle child, said, ‘Can I listen too, Mum?’ I did a quick think, and said, ‘That’s fine.’ I knew it was aiming for a middle-ground audience, so you’re careful about what you say. But I’d forgotten that the interviewer had asked me, ‘How do you reconcile the situations you can find yourself in and being a mum?’ And I’d said, ‘I believe I’m getting close to the point where I’m irresponsible, because my children need to know that their mother’s coming home.’ I looked at Grace, and her eyes were filling with tears, and she said, ‘What d’you mean you might not come home, Mum?’ I said, ‘Well, I might miss the plane …’ You could see what she was thinking: she wasn’t fooled.

When I did the second tour in Iraq, she was the one who suffered. I phoned every night, but she suffered, and I thought: I cannot put her through that. So I turn things down. I won’t go back to Iraq.

What about your husband? How supportive is he?

We’ve known each other since our teens, so we’ve been together a very long time. We went to university together, and he studied anatomy as well, but he learnt pretty quickly that if you want a decent income you don’t become an academic! So he went into business.

But he understands what I do, and he’s got a very good way of dealing with me. When I get home after being away he’ll not question me at all. Three or four days later I’ll start to tell him stories, and then he’ll wheedle bits of information out of me. He’s a very good listener, and we’ll sit and talk about it, but it’ll take a few days.

How would you say the extraordinary things you’ve experienced as a forensic anthropologist have affected your outlook on life?

The bottom line is that so many things don’t seem important any more. I don’t care if the floor doesn’t get hoovered. It doesn’t matter in the world if there’s a scratch on the car. I care that my children get a great big hug every night before they go to bed, because you’ve just dealt with 20 children who will never have that again. So you go home and you hold your children tighter, there’s no doubt. You value your family much, much more than you otherwise would, because you see the frailty of life. And that’s what’s important. The material side of things … it just doesn’t matter.