Expert Witness (3 page)

A
t the time of writing, I am 40 years old and five feet eight inches tall, with longish blonde hair. It's going grey, but you can't tell unless you get too close, in which case you'll be in my personal space and I'll have to move away. Unless I'm showing you my grey hair to demonstrate how having kids and being a full-time forensic scientist caused me to go grey overnight. I've always wanted to be six foot tall, but it never happened. My brother is six foot four but it's wasted on him; he moans about being too big to find a motorbike that fits him properly. He also moans about the diminutive size of aeroplane seats, but he's not alone on that one.

Although some women wear heels to add extra height, I stopped doing that after I gave evidence in Oxford Magistrates' Court. The court set-up was very strange, or at least that's how I remember it. In England, Wales and Scotland, we stand up to give evidence unlike New Zealand, where the usual protocol is sitting down. Only once did I give evidence sitting down in England, and that was when I had to do some blood alcohol calculations in the witness box when I was seven months' pregnant. I couldn't physically reach the pen and paper I'd placed on the shelf inside the witness box where they keep the
Bible and oath cards. The judge asked if I'd like to sit down and I was relieved to say yes. It's like going to the house of one of your granny's friends — you don't sit down in an English judge's court unless invited to do so.

This particular witness box had a very low front. It seemed to come up to mid thigh, and it's high off the ground so you look down on counsel and the central court area. On this day however, I was wearing long black boots with four inch heels, so the edge of the box was about knee height. All I could think about was not wanting to lean forward too much in case I toppled out over the front and landed on the prosecution counsel; I had a touch of the vertigo thing going on. It was a typical English court situation — everyone ignored the elephant in the room, which in this case was the obvious discomfort of the expert witness (me) with the situation in the witness box. My evidence wasn't of any significant consequence as I was basically confirming what the prosecution was saying — that the defendant's account of alcohol consumption was so off the wall that had she consumed as much as she was saying, she would probably have been dead.

To add insult to injury, I'd been late arriving in Oxford, had struggled to find a parking space and ended up putting the car in some faceless, grey, underground municipal dungeon. In my rush, I'd parked so far away from the court I had to catch a taxi to get there from the car park. Oxford has one of those hideous we-hate-cars attitudes and actively discourages vehicles in the city centre. All well and good if you're a local or on a coach trip from Birmingham but a pain in the proverbial if you're in a rush and trying to park. The problem was that when I'd finished teetering over the front of the witness box at court,
I had no idea where I'd left the car. It was pouring with that special sort of grey, cold rain that soaks through your suede boots in 30 seconds flat. I was very late home and very grouchy.

But back to how I ended up in Oxford with inappropriate footwear and a hidden Skoda.

I think it was all just the roll of the dice. I started off training as a geologist and had an absolute blast in my under graduate years, charging around the European countryside looking for fossils and measuring dips and strikes (rock-related measurements). There had always been an assumption that I would go to university, and I never even thought to challenge it. I just went off to Southampton when I was 18 and came back when I was 21 and overdrawn. Well, my mum will tell you I came back more often than that, usually with a couple of bags of laundry, but I did (mostly) do the washing myself.

As any graduate will tell you, a simple Honours degree is not enough to get you anywhere, so I needed to be more conscientious, do more studying and gain more qualifications. With this at the forefront of my mind, I returned home to the family nest, where I lived rent-free while stashing away whatever cash I earned as a legal secretary. After six months of hard saving, I had a quick look through the university prospectus and promptly went off travelling around the world.

Although I had a great time overseas, when I came back I still needed qualifications and a career plan. So I went back to Southampton to do a Master of Science degree, paid for by my long-suffering mother, because my first degree was average and I wasn't eligible for funding assistance.

Towards the end of my first degree and throughout
my Masters I specialised in sedimentary rocks, micro-palaeontology (micro fossils) and palynology. Palynology is, very basically, the study of microscopic material formed of extremely chemically resistant material, usually pollen grains of seed plants, spores of ferns and various other microscopic particles (we usually refer to them collectively as ‘pollen'). In the oil industry, chemical processes are used to extract pollen from rock samples and cores of material brought up from underground using long drills.

Fossilised pollen can help oil engineers ‘see' their way around underground. By examining sequences of rocks and noting the way in which the micro fossils vary in different rock layers (in conjunction with many other sophisticated techniques), it is possible to build up a three-dimensional picture of the sediments and structures beneath the ground surface. Once an engineer/geologist identifies the rock layer through which they want to drill or construct, it's a matter of examining the micro fossils in that layer as drilling progresses to make sure the drilling stays in the direction it's supposed to. The tunnel that runs under the English Channel between England and France was kept on track partly by using micro-fossil analysis of the rocks being dug out. Back then, studying micro palaeontology was a traditional way into the oil industry or engineering geology.

I had another great year doing my Masters but by the end of the course, the oil industry had bottomed out and many top-level geologists and palynologists had been made redundant. There was no way the oil companies would give a job to a fresh post-graduate like me. Plus I would have had to do helicopter training, and that was a no-no. Did I fancy being plunged into
a freezing cold swimming pool of water while strapped into the frame of a helicopter, just to see if I could get out alive? Strangely, no, I didn't. I know plenty of people who have done it, but they're real geologists.

Instead I spent some time living in the Canary Islands holiday resort of Tenerife, in that most classy of areas, Playa de las Americas. Anyone who has ever been to Tenerife or in fact anywhere like Ibiza, Majorca, Costa del Sol or Costa Brava will know these places are infested, and there's no cure. They are hopelessly infested with that most terrible of diseases —
Brits Abroad.
With knotted hankies on their heads (it's true), white and red suntans, drinking enough lager and alcopops to float a ship round the world, the British on holiday are a curious breed. I feel qualified to say that because not only did I work with them, I was one of them. Only once mind you, in 1994 for a week in February. It was such good fun I decided I'd like to live and work in Tenerife, which was a mistake of course, because life as a worker in a holiday resort is far removed from life as a tourist.

It wasn't the shift work or long, late hours that put me off living in Tenerife; it was the alcohol and drugs people poured into themselves. I couldn't stand the endless swilling and related drunkenness and the clatter of pill-popping all around me; some people should have had a childproof cap instead of a head, given the number of pills they popped every day. One day I just decided I'd had enough, I couldn't stand seeing it any more. There are only so many times I can put up with stag parties throwing up in the street or drunken women shrieking at each other and staggering about on high heels or watch helplessly as a pickpocket relieved yet another drunk
of their wallet. You couldn't even go for a swim unless you left someone up by the towels on the beach because some times even a wet, sandy towel was pinched.

Having worked with holidaymakers at their worst and then working in England in a soul-destroying job looking after cashpoint machine engineers (it was the job that was soul-destroying, not the engineers), in 1996 I moved to New Zealand. I rang the University of Auckland not long after I arrived. The conversation went some thing like this:

Unbelievable but true nonetheless. Doing that PhD was the best and worst experience of my life. Never has anything been so draining, with me working 16 hours a day for the last two years because I had to get a job and work full time as well as try to finish it. As anyone will tell you, a half-finished PhD is worse than not having started one at all, so you have to finish it, no matter how difficult it might become because of other circumstances. So I finished it and promptly had two consecutive bouts of flu, which lasted two months.

Unfortunately, towards the end of my PhD I decided a life in academia was not going to be for me, certainly not at that stage. Some would say that perhaps it would have been useful to know this before I started but them's the breaks, I guess. I really enjoy research but achieving a permanent, full-time
job as a lecturer is not just about research ability or preparing lectures. It's about fighting for funding for your projects. Without funding you have no research projects; without research projects you can't attract postgraduate students and you haven't got anything to publish. These days, it's all about how many papers you can publish and how many other researchers cite your papers in their research papers. The advent of the Internet and electronic publishing of research papers means that the number of times your papers are cited in other people's publications can be tracked electronically. You are then automatically compared with your colleagues, not only in your own department or educational institute but also globally. Talk about pressure.

During the final years of my PhD I became interested in the application of pollen to solving crime. I attended a one-day course on forensic palynology where I met a man who was to become a colleague, who was also a geology graduate but had retrained in forensic science. He suggested I take the forensic science course at the University of Auckland. It was a total eye-opener. Before then I'd never done anything that felt so right for me, but forensic science was just exactly that. Geology was good and I enjoyed it, but I never saw myself working as a geologist. Forensic science on the other hand, well, it was just so logical and simple. The analytical techniques and the equipment used in forensic science are broadly the same as those used in geology. The basic science was easy to under stand because I'd covered all of it during my years at university. Here, finally, I had found what I wanted to be when I grew up. At the age of 30, I decided I wanted to be a forensic scientist.

The next step was to get an actual job, which is tough in an industry where jobs are about as common as hen's teeth. I worked as a consultant in Auckland for a while, which meant I did casework experience without my employer having to commit to employing me full time, then decided I needed to go back to England.

It wasn't that I decided England was the best place for me but I had been living in New Zealand for six years by that time. I love living in someone else's country but it was crunch time. A lot had changed in my life since I'd moved to New Zealand in 1996 and I didn't know whether I was in New Zealand for the right reasons. I needed to leave because I was trapped in a depressing cycle where, even on a sunny day, it felt dark.

So I hopped online, searched New Scientist Jobs and there, calling my name, was a job as a forensic science consultant in Cambridgeshire, England. I emailed them my CV and the partner rang to ask me to come for an interview. It was kind of casually said, as if I could catch the 12.42 train from London and be there in time for afternoon tea. As it was, I packed a carry-on bag and checked in at Auckland International Airport for a week's round-trip to England. I doubt if these days I'd be allowed on a plane to London with just hand luggage, but other than checking that I hadn't accidentally left a 30-kilo suitcase in the car, the lady on the check-in desk gave me my ticket and off I went.

I'd also set up an interview with West Mercia police as a crime scene examiner, so I went to both interviews in the one week. I was 45 minutes late for the first interview because I became stuck behind a tractor, whose driver had absolutely no
intention of letting pesky cars get past him on country roads. He was happily sitting on his bouncy tractor seat, grubby hat plonked on his head, piece of straw bobbing up and down in his mouth. I know it sounds clichéd, but clichés have their basis in truth and here was Farmer Giles, real as a cow pat. The reason I know he was chewing straw was because he kept turning round to look at how many cars he had behind him. Maybe it was National Tractor Car-Trapping Day. It was uncanny that when he turned around, it was always on that one bit of road when there would have been enough gap and forward view to pass him, if only the tractor hadn't drifted over the central line of the road. Anyway, the interview went well and I managed to make it home
sans
tractor interference.

I was also late for the second interview in Cambridgeshire. It doesn't look that far on the map from Bristol to Cambridge, but it's hideous. Too many years overseas had made me forget the horror of the M25 London orbital motorway. A car crashed in front of me, pin-wheeled to the roadside, and not one person stopped. Not because we didn't want to, but because it's impossible to extricate one's vehicle from the relentless, sluggish flow. When it's busy, traffic on the M25 has a special magnetic quality — you just can't break free and there's no hope of returning to the flow once you're out of it. Thankfully, in my rear view mirror I saw a police patrol car pull up just as I was crawling out of sight of the shocked driver. I rolled on towards the A1 and eventually got to the interview a mere two hours late. I loathe being late so I was cross with myself, embarrassed and stressed. It's not a good look and as I waited in reception with the office girls checking me out and casting eyebrow-wiggling glances at one another,
I was pretty sure I'd blown it before I'd even started talking.