CHAPTER 3
Proxies of the Past
It is time, perhaps, to go back to the beginning.
I did not mean to become what I have become—and this, of course, is how all the best stories start. I was already in my early fifties when I got the telephone call that would change the course of my life, drawing me into the world of forensic investigation. By then, my career was already what you might call wide and varied. I had started my working life training as a medical laboratory technician at Charing Cross Hospital, and was involved in the second renal dialysis unit in Britain. I was certainly used to dealing with blood and excrement and having to put up with vile odors; it was part of the job. Eventually, I became involved in research projects, and this meant dealing with laboratory animals. I came to love the rats—white, pink-nosed, twitching little things. They were curious and loved being cuddled and tickled. I loved the animals and hated the research program, and I decided emphatically that medical research was not going to be my career.
My boyfriend, whom I later married, thought I should do something more “ladylike” than working with rats, analyzing urine, feces, and blood. But what, I wondered, did “ladylike” really mean? Perhaps the full-time business and secretarial course I had just seen advertised was what I needed, so I applied and got a full-time, funded place. The course proved to be quite hard. It was new and the college employed part-time practicing professionals to lecture in the core subjects—law, economics, psychology, and English. In addition, there was great pressure to excel at typewriting and Pitman’s shorthand (the most logical, yet flexible, and wonderful system I have ever encountered). We also had to learn just about everything needed to run a high-powered office. After all the studying I have done in my life, I look back on that course as being truly outstanding. I loved the challenge and achieved a distinction for the diploma. Come the end of the course, all the students were entered into the examinations run by the London Chamber of Commerce—these were competitive and international, and where secretarial and business skills were tested and scrutinized. I was staggered when I came first, but quite enjoyed all the publicity and fun that went with it, including being presented with an award at Mansion House by Lord Luke.
After I graduated, my first job was working in Knightsbridge at the head office of Coca-Cola. New recruits put on pounds because the product was on tap, and my first encounter with corporate loyalty was having to be seen with a glass of the sugary, acidic concoction on one’s desk at all times. I thought it was a ridiculous job, working for egotistical, dark-suited nobodies, all engaged in selling something that sold itself anyway, so I quickly moved on to work for a huge, prestigious building company. It was a demanding and responsible job, and it was fun reading about the technical side of the building of monumental projects like London Bridge and Drax Power Station but, after some years, even that job grew wearisome. It was just not satisfying and I was bored. There was too much routine and too little opportunity to learn things that fascinate: I needed new challenges. I was like a pony pushing at the field boundary, wanting to know and sample what was on the other side. I wanted to learn what was out there.
What I did next led me into one of the happiest phases of my life. I went to read botany at King’s College London. It had taken me until I was in my late twenties to find my true niche, and, after all the things I had tried, I felt I had arrived. I was ten years older than most of the other undergraduates, but no one seemed to notice, and there were certainly no barriers between us; we just mixed in together. By this time, I was married and running a home, but I joined in many of the usual student activities. I was elected as president of the Biological Society, and my particular friend, Myra O’Donnell (a brilliant and highly organized zoologist), and I spent every Saturday morning in the fencing class in the gym. This was situated in the bowels of the Strand building.
Our tutor was a dashing Hungarian of a certain age who, between the flamboyant sweeping back of his hair, poked us in the ribs with his foil until we learned how to guard and riposte. Because I got so out of breath, he kindly allowed me to take my bronze medal exam in two parts, thus allowing me to keep the fantasy that I could fence. Outside the gym, the corridor had very old paving slabs and was lined with lockers dating from Georgian times, each bearing gold-painted, decorative numbers. Myra and I used to fight all along the corridor, up the steps leading to the main foyer, and back again. One Saturday I said, “Do you realize that we have created a choreography and that neither of us can win?” We fell over laughing, but continued our ritualistic Saturday routines.
I look back on my time at King’s as being magical, exploring as many academic topics as I could fit into my schedule! Even though I was supposed to be a botanist, I grasped every opportunity to learn ecology, geology, microbiology, zoology, parasitology, biogeography, and anything that gave me a greater understanding of the natural world. It was a joy to spend hours in the library being surprised by texts that today’s students—who rely extensively on electronic information—would never encounter. It was a traditional education, attending small tutorials, taking notes, writing essays, browsing the library, carrying out research projects, and enjoying field trips in many and diverse habitats. I learned the secrets of so many facets of the natural world, from the nervous system of a lizard to the structure of grasses. It was the making of me and I loved it.
Eventually, I became a lecturer in microbial ecology at King’s. At first I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of “being on the other side of the fence.” It was rewarding to help students enrich themselves with knowledge of the natural world. I felt I was passing on something very special, knowledge that should not be lost—but eventually, my heavy teaching load, the grinding routine of writing and delivering lectures, setting and marking essays and examinations, and attending meetings got me down. So, after eighteen years in one of the happiest places I have ever been privileged to work, I applied for a job at University College London, in the Institute of Archeology. I wanted to spend most of my time on research rather than on teaching.
The botany department at King’s was small, the staff were jolly and we had lots of fun; and any occasion of note was marked with a party where everyone, from the first-year students to the professorial staff, attended. At UCL, it was very different. Here, apart from the occasional seminar, I was fully engaged in research and the atmosphere was utterly different. I had gained a new title that I was not sure I deserved. I had become an “environmental archeologist.” At King’s, lunch and teatime breaks were full of laughter and intellectual discussion, and I looked forward to walking through the front door to the department each day. At UCL, people kept to themselves and stayed in their rooms; it was difficult to get to know any of them. But the nature of the work made up for the lack of social life, and I soon made chums with other environmental archeologists all over the UK.
It was a most fascinating time, analyzing sediments from archeological sites and their surroundings, trying to ascertain the variation in ancient landscapes, the kinds of crops and husbandry carried out by prehistoric peoples. It meant I spent long weeks tramping around archeological sites all over the country, taking soil and sediment samples from buried surfaces, pits, and ditches back to the laboratory, and carrying out the lengthy and dangerous chemical processes involved in retrieving the organic particulates from the cores and monoliths of deposit. After analyzing sample after sample from site after site, from the Paleolithic period to medieval, I gradually realized the potential and limitations of the techniques we were using. I spent my life reconstructing environments from organic particles, pollen grains, and spores retrieved from the archeological features. The role of the environmental archeologist is to give color, life, and meaning to the settlements unearthed by the diggers.
I analyzed sites as varied as a fort on Hadrian’s Wall, and a deep bog to its north, an inn excavated from the volcanic ash in Pompeii, and even the multiphase site under Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport. My
work at Heathrow revealed a most wonderful Bronze Age landscape which must have been a rural idyll four thousand years ago, with long, pretty hedgerows dividing up fields that variously held cattle and sheep, or were planted with cereals. It was like looking through very thick lenses so that although we could gain a good idea of past land use, we could only check our interpretations against modern ethnographic examples. There was no way of knowing whether our interpretations were truly accurate. There were many rewards, though, and a major one was working on sites with other environmental archeologists. I analyzed pollen and spores (palynomorphs). Peter Murphy, a very special friend of mine working at the University of East Anglia, specialized in seeds, other bits of plant you could see with your naked eye (macrofossils), and mollusk shells; others analyzed animal bone or human remains; and another special friend, Richard Macphail, who was with me at the Institute, was (and still is) a soil micromorphologist. He embedded soils in resin, cut thin sections from the blocks, and found clues to previous human activity directly under the microscope. I was nearly as interested in his work as I was my own. Just imagine being able to see a section of soil under the surface—all its minerals and organisms suspended as if in “aspic”—being able to view a microcosm in its hidden reality. These were the soils which supported the plants, animals, and people that others of us “brought to life” in building up realistic pictures of the past.
We had many happy meetings and much fun, on sites and at conferences, and collectively we created pictures of what had happened through many phases of ancient occupation and development. When you visit a museum and you see the reconstruction of a Roman farm, a Saxon village, or a Stone Age hut, you can thank the band of environmental and other archeological specialists who have done meticulous analysis to bring you the story. To my mind, without them archeology would be as dry as dust—flints, pottery, stones, and metal, with an occasional thrill of a bone, jewel, or carved stone. Essentially, the archeologist carries out the excavation and retrieves those wonderful things from the ground in a meticulous way, but it is the specialists in the multitude of disciplines—metallurgy, pottery, entomology, botany, osteology, and micromorphology of ancient and buried soils—who bring everything alive. Not many people know that.
Pollen and spores, and many other microscopic things in my samples, are proxies of the past. If the activity of bacteria and fungi is suppressed by lack of oxygen, or by acidity, pollen can remain preserved for thousands of years. We could not miss or ignore a single one, because even insignificant, tiny particles might be informative. After the processing, samples were permanently mounted onto microscope slides, and then the grindingly hard, real work started—sitting at the microscope for hour after hour, scanning transect after transect across the slide in strict sequence, resisting any attempt to miss a single field of view in case something important was overlooked. I was fascinated by reconstructing ancient environments and it was marvelous being with colleagues who worked with other classes of evidence, our work all being combined in the final report to paint pictures of the past. I was fairly happy with my lot, so when the telephone rang that day, I did not expect it to begin a new chapter in the story of my life.
The voice on the end of the line had a thick Glaswegian accent and belonged to an officer in Hertfordshire Constabulary.
“Are you Pat Wiltshire?” he asked. “We’ve been given your name by Kew. They weren’t able to help us . . .” Here he paused, as if to let something sink in, “. . . but they said you could.”
Only a few moments ago, I had been somewhere in the Neolithic period, building up an image of our native forests, as they were beaten back and burned down by these first farmers. Now, wrenched into the present again, I hesitated.
“Oooh, right,” I said.
I was intrigued—I had never been contacted by the police before.
“What’s involved?”
“You’re a . . . polyologist?”
“Not quite,” I said, doing my best imitation of patience at this common error. “I am a palynologist.”
Palynology. Quite literally “the study of dust”—or, to put it more helpfully, the study of pollen, spores, all the other microscopic palynomorphs, and particulates that we can collect from the air, from water, or from sedimentary deposits, some soils, and vegetation. To become a palynologist had not been a grand plan of mine either, but it was the road along which life had funneled me and I was quite content. There was much more freedom than when having to be responsible for students.
The detective on the other end of the line was still waiting for an answer.
“Why do you need a palynologist?” I asked.
The voice came back bluntly: “We’ve got a murder.” I nearly laughed because, in his Scottishness, he rolled his Rs very strongly and “murder” became “merrrderrr.” All this was so improbable that it could have been from a play in the West End.
“A murder? How can I help you?”
“We have a body and we have a car.”
I have often looked back on this conversation as a turning point in my life. The fact of the matter is that at the first mention of the word “murder,” I had become more than intrigued. When you work in laboratories day in and day out, sometimes an intrusion from the outside world is very welcome. Apart from members of my own family I had never seen a dead body, although at King’s I was responsible for teaching about decomposition and breakdown of materials after death. This needed an understanding of the roles played by micro-animals, bacteria, and fungi in breaking down bodies, whether they were of dead birds or trees. Was a dead human such a big step? In an academic sense, perhaps not, but in every other way, this was a leap into the unknown, and I was not prepared for it.
As I listened, the detective outlined everything he thought I needed to know. A body had been found in a field ditch, somewhere in rural Hertfordshire, but it seemed that this had been an accidental killing.
“We are dealing with Chinese Triad crime.”
That was something one only ever heard of on TV and never really believed existed—in the realms of Sherlock Holmes. But one is led to believe that the Triads are vicious outfits whose activities have serious consequences. On this occasion they had not meant to kill their victim; they had abducted him on his wedding day, not from his wife’s bed but from that of a prostitute. I have to say I was quite stunned to hear that particular snippet of information. I had never come across anything like it before. I live in a place where we do not even get graffiti, although I suppose a bicycle occasionally gets stolen from the station.
The gang had hog-tied him and put him in the back of a van, meaning only to teach him a brutal lesson. He had been engaged by the gang for a money-laundering venture, buying and selling property, but he had made the mistake of siphoning off cash for his own use. He was a big man and being thrown onto his front while hog-tied resulted in his heart and lungs failing: he died of asphyxiation under his own weight.
When I first spoke to them, all the police had was the car that had accompanied the van when they dumped the body, but the van had been disposed of very quickly. The gang must have panicked—they had decided to dump the body in some remote place in Wales, but their sense of direction was somewhat flawed. To get to Wales from London, one needs to go west along the M4 motorway, but they found themselves traveling up the A10 northward in Hertfordshire. In the dark and being disoriented, they must have been relieved to find a side road off the A10 which seemed to lead to an isolated field.
Then came mistake number two. They put the body in the field ditch and tried, stupidly, to obliterate the victim’s identity by pouring accelerant over his corpse and setting fire to it. Left alone, the body might never have been discovered except by flies and scavengers—rats, birds, foxes, and badgers. Scrub would have grown up around it and long grasses hidden it from view. Earthworms, slugs, snails, beetles, and ants would soon have moved in and, before a season had passed, especial
ly if it had been warm, a body would have barely remained. Any bones, picked clean, would eventually be buried by busy earthworms—they will bury anything placed on a surface if left for long enough. Darwin had neatly demonstrated this by placing paving slabs on his own lawn. But by setting the body alight, this man’s killers had created a beacon in the dark which was still smoking the next day. It was the rising smoke that had caught the attentions of the farmer and, after him, the police.
“We’ve got them in custody,” said the detective, whom I now know as Bill Bryden MBE. “We’ve got their car. We’re certain it’s them. But . . . we need to prove it.” The detective paused. “And then the boss thought . . . maize pollen.”
His boss turned out to be one of the most engaging people I had ever met. He was Paul Dockley, a young and intelligent assistant chief constable. I had never had anything to do with the police before, and I had already met two great chaps in Bill and Paul, who are my friends to this day. They have always been very supportive of my work and, indeed, of forensic ecology.
“Maize pollen?”
“They had to drive into the field to leave him in that ditch, and the farmer told us that it was usually planted with maize. If they drove through the field, the governor thought that maize pollen could be on the car. That’s where you come in. We need somebody who could tell us for sure. Did this car go into that field?”
It was a new idea, he said. It was not something any police force had thought about before. Well, I had thought about it in a vague sort of way; the odd article in popular magazines had made me think along these lines, but I never imagined I would be presented with anything like this. Why maize pollen had popped into his boss’s head, he was not quite sure; I had not even seen the car but already I knew that any chances of success were infinitesimally small. The calendar on the wall read May, and that meant we were at least six weeks away from the maize flowering period in southern England. Not only that, farmers plow and apply fertilizer to arable fields so that the soils become nutrient-enriched and aerated, and these conditions enhance microbial activity. Farmed fields, particularly in southern England, are paradises for fungi, bacteria, and the rest of the microbiota, so that organic material readily decomposes. No, I did not think that pollen and spores would have been preserved in such a typically managed field. And yet . . .
The Nature of Life and Death Page 4