The Kenyon offices are in a forgettable brick building out on a bleak industrial plane on the fringes of London where everything is either roundabout or car park. There is nothing here but huge shops that sell stuff to fix your car, your house, your garden – everything that makes your life look good from the outside. Halfords Autocentre, Wickes, Homebase. A visibly derelict but apparently still functioning bowling alley called Hollywood Bowl rises above a shabby Pizza Hut. Everything is mostly tarmac bar the self-conscious attempts at beautifying the concrete with landscaping: a pond with a short bridge over it and a sign on a tree stump telling you how beautiful all of this is. Someone in a hi-vis yellow vest waves to me from the other end of another car park: ‘Yes, this is the place,’ the wave says – the place in question being chosen for its proximity to Heathrow Airport and nothing else. There is no time to waste in a mass fatality, wherever in the world it might be.
I’d never heard of Kenyon – a company whose logo subtitle says ‘International Emergency Services’, which is sort of vague about what it is, exactly, that they do – but Iwan, the company’s operations manager, tells me there’s a good reason for my ignorance: I’m not supposed to have heard of Kenyon. ‘We’re a white-label company. When you phone up for information after a disaster, we’re working on behalf of a client. We take their name,’ he says, as he places a plate of Party Rings and a cup of tea on the glass coffee table in the reception area. I found them when I was looking around for a detective to interview – a lot of ex-police end up here. But it’s not like Kenyon and what they do are a secret. Their website is full of stories by people who work there, talking about things they’ve done, places they’ve been deployed. He leaves me with a pile of magazines: the Funeral Service Times, the Aeronautical Journal, Insight: The Voice of Independent Funeral Directors and Airliner World. I’m at the intersection of a Venn diagram.
When a disaster happens, when your plane crashes or your building burns or your train T-bones a bus, Kenyon will assume your company’s name and work in tandem with the local authorities to deal with the aftermath. They will respond to the media for you, making sure your message is clear and consistent so that your staff can concentrate on the internal implosion that is likely occurring. They will fix your website so that if, for example, the co-pilot deliberately ploughed your Germanwings plane into the Alps, killing all 144 passengers plus the six crew members, there are no glossy photographs of the Alps on your page promoting travel on your low-cost airline while emergency workers are picking through the wreckage on the mountain.
Kenyon will set up a crisis line that people can phone to register the missing and inquire about developments. They will provide family liaison officers to translate the horror into something true but manageable, one familiar voice instead of a company that speaks to them en masse through a megaphone. They will set up the ‘dark side’ of your website, where families can log in and be given information in real time, and a family assistance centre where they can sit and wait and be, where they can pray on the book of their chosen religion, have access to mental-health practitioners, and hear announcements made in every language that needs to be heard.
Kenyon make travel arrangements for families affected and move people from the farthest reaches of the earth to the place where their loved one died, whether that requires a plane, a train, or a horse and cart to fetch them from the deepest forest in Brazil. They secure accommodation, quietly ensuring the hotel doesn’t also have a wedding with 400 guests at the same time as the media briefing on a plane crash, and organise staggered mealtimes so that grieving families are not eating at the same time as holiday guests. They will organise the memorials: over a hundred years of experience in managing disasters (their first was in 1906, when a boat train jumped its tracks and crashed in Salisbury, England) means Kenyon knows that every disaster is different, and how each culture deals with death and dead bodies is different; they know that giving roses to Japanese families to place on their dead is improper – white chrysanthemums are preferred. Every practical problem that comes up has already been considered and dealt with, including the likelihood of media faking ID cards to sneak into the family assistance centre for tabloid scoops: in 2010, when a runway crash at a Libyan airport resulted in 103 dead, a reporter was arrested for doing just this. If the disaster is a fire, they will have already requested that the catering crew steer clear of barbecued meat.
They’ve thought of everything you haven’t, and won’t, because you’re in the midst of a catastrophe and this probably hasn’t happened to you, or your company, before.
I’m here for Kenyon’s open day, where they are selling – this is, after all, a commercial enterprise – a step-by-step solution to a problem that hasn’t arrived yet. There are dozens of people here today representing all kinds of companies that see mass fatality as a very real possibility in their futures: airlines, local councils, service industries, rail companies, bus companies, fire services, shipping companies, oil and gas companies. Over the course of seven hours, Kenyon is going to explain why these businesses need to sign up with them now, before the bad thing happens. They’re going to explain why having a plan in place is essential, not only to the families and to staff, but to the company name. Malaysian Airlines will crop up repeatedly as a cautionary tale, an airline that will likely never recover from their two crashes in 2014 that left a death toll of 537. As we sit on fold-out chairs, clutching paper bags with Kenyon-branded stationery, surrounded by model aeroplanes balanced on windowsills, we are told that people on the whole can accept a disaster. They can grieve their lost loved ones and can handle grim truth better than you think. But they cannot and will not accept an inadequate response from a company that had no plan for the living or the dead.
Mark Oliver, or ‘Mo’ as everyone calls him, is fifty-three. If the police were to describe him they would say he was average height, average build, glasses, with grey hair short and neat enough to be military. He wears a suit to work except when he’s deployed to a disaster: there he’ll be wearing something from his go-bag that he keeps ready and waiting in the sprawling warehouse out the back of the Kenyon office. He takes me through a door with a laminated piece of white A4 that says in all red-and-black caps: STOP! CHECK! ARE YOU DIRTY??? to a line of tall, grey school lockers near shelves bearing folded embalming tables stacked ten deep above portable embalming kits. He opens a locker and perfunctorily shows off large evidence bags repurposed to allow ease of packing, each holding clothes for climates hot, cold, wet, dry. Everything is neatly folded, enough in each bag for a week or so, enough time to get a plan in place to have more clothes sent to wherever he needs to be. He opens another locker and points. ‘There,’ he says, laughing, ‘now you’ve seen my boss’s underpants.’
Mo joined Kenyon in 2014 and became VP of operations in 2018. He’s responsible for their field operations, training and consultancy, as well as managing their vast list of team members. Among the 2,000 people on the Kenyon payroll are people who previously worked in aviation, psychologists specialising in grief and PTSD, firefighters, forensic scientists, radiographers, former Naval officers, police officers, detective constables and a former commander of New Scotland Yard. There are crisis-management specialists with experience in crises both air travel- and banking-related, embalmers and funeral directors, retired pilots, bomb disposal specialists and an advisor to the Mayor of London. If you were putting together an apocalypse crew, you could do worse than this. Add a surgeon and you’d probably survive with the cockroaches and the deep sea fish.
Prior to all of this, Mo spent thirty years in the police service across the UK. As a senior investigating officer he worked on homicides, organised crime, anti-corruption and counterterrorism. Despite his serious role, Mo is a joker. Not quite in the same flippant way that Baltimore cops in David Simon’s Homicide pasted angel wings to the backs of dead drug dealer mugshots and hung them from their Christmas tree, but that humour you find in the bleakest of places is present and accounted for in Mo. It needs to be – humour sustains, and here at Kenyon it carries a considerable load: we’re in the same warehouse as thousands of items that belonged to the tenants of Grenfell Tower, the burned-out apartment block that loomed black and skeletal over west London until the authorities covered it up with a giant tarpaulin and hoped we’d look away. It doesn’t matter how far away from the burning of Grenfell Tower we get, 14 June 2017 still feels like a fresh wound. Seventy-two people died, seventy were injured, and 223 people escaped from this fire that highlighted the political and social failings of the system, high and low. As the inquest rolled on, Kenyon was still picking through the personal belongings of those in the building and trying to locate the families at their new, temporary addresses in order to return them. From almost all of the 129 flats, something was found. Some 750,000 individual items were boxed up and brought back from North Kensington to be processed here, then cleaned and returned. It was still happening two years later, in 2019, when I visited Kenyon.
Earlier, I watched Mo explain the power and significance of personal effects to people who would have to explain that same power to the people who control the money, who have the authority to say whether or not it is worth shelling out for their recovery. Personal effects are not just stuff; he tells us that within an item that somebody had with them at the time they met their end there is untold emotional weight, and it is not for us to judge how heavy. Traditionally, local authorities aren’t too bothered with personal effects; police might stick them in a cupboard and forget about them, or pass them to someone else who might forget about them too (I once worked with an investigative journalist who had a murder victim’s clothes in a plastic bag in his desk drawer that he intended to return, but it wasn’t a priority). But death is trans-formative, not just to the person and the family; it changes the objects in a house. These objects become, as Maggie Nelson wrote in The Red Parts – a book about the murder of her aunt and the subsequent trial – talismans.
Now Mo is walking me through the aisles of things found inside Grenfell, boxes stacked high above us. ‘It was crammed before,’ he says, of a warehouse I would still classify as crammed. There may be a lot less here than there used to be, but it still takes over most of the place. Thousands of cardboard boxes line the shelves, and things that are too large to fit in a box are stacked in their categories by the wall: pushbikes ranging from a child’s BMX to an adult-size racer, prams, bouncy things you put babies in while the twirling mobile dazzles them into silence. Suitcases. High chairs, singed and not. To the front of the warehouse is the processing department: Kenyon will ask, if an item is being returned, whether the family want it cleaned, be it a toy car, pyjama bottoms or a coin. ‘If you’d been here earlier you would have seen washing lines strung up across the aisles,’ he says, grinning and spreading his arms out like a scarecrow – they’d done a panic-tidy before the open day. There are bottles of cleaning products on the shelves, hair dryers, multiple irons. Just off this area of the warehouse is the photography room, where gridded A4 pages show examples of how to photograph different items, from pens to bras, to sweaters with an arm folded, the other outstretched.
Back in the reception area I had flipped through a binder of ‘unassociated personal effects’ – photographs, taken here, of items from other disasters that never did find their owners but are still filed away somewhere with an ID number, waiting. Standing there, among open-day attendees eating triangular sandwiches off paper plates and fussing with a tea urn, I found it haunting. The personal item next to the systematic code, the thickness of the binder, thousands of meaningless things filled with meaning for someone unknown. Tortoiseshell reading glasses with a frame warped by fire or explosion or both, keys to houses and Alfa Romeos, prayer cards. A bloated Ian Rankin novel pulled from the sea.
When the family has been identified and contacted and they are absolutely sure they don’t want the item back, whatever it may be needs to be rendered unidentifiable before it is thrown away. Mo takes me to the back of the warehouse, to a different department, where six people in white jumpsuits and protective visors smash nineties VHS tapes with hammers, the careful Sharpie lettering along the stickers visible in a gloved hand before it is obliterated. He’s shouting over the noises of hammers hitting plastic, of pieces flying and landing nearby, some joke about paid stress relief, but I can’t quite hear him. I see episodes of Friends taped over episodes of Taggart. I see tapes that look exactly like tapes I have at home that hold irreplaceable footage of childhood. In among the shards, a Britney Spears CD.
Three months after the flames were extinguished, Kenyon workers, still combing through the charred remains, found a fish tank in the blackened tower. Somehow, despite the lack of food, electricity to oxygenate their water, and the twenty-three dead fish floating belly up above them, seven fish still lived. The family from the flat were contacted but were unable to house them in their current situation, so with their blessing, one of the Kenyon staff adopted the fish. They even managed to breed, resulting in the most unlikely thing to rise from the ashes of a burned building: a baby fish.
They called it Phoenix.
It was never the plan to end up here: Mo was retired from the police force when he was offered the role. But two decades ago, he took part in an operation that would set the current course.
It was 2000, the year after the controversial eleven-week bombing campaign by NATO to end the Kosovo War, and international help was arriving to investigate the atrocities. Intelligence reports located mass graves, and forensic teams carried out exhumations and post-mortems, and tried to identify the dead to reunite them with their families. They needed someone urgently to fill in for five weeks. Mo was, at that point, running homicide investigations, specifically unsolved murders. He was used to going to post-mortems, he was used to being organised, and he could set up the computer systems they needed for an undertaking this huge – the skills that made him a good police officer made him an ideal candidate for the job. ‘I flew over there, got given the keys to a Land Rover, and the next day they sent me a team of thirty people to brief.’ His eyes bug out as he’s telling me now: mass graves in Kosovo were a world away from Hendon, north London. ‘Crikey,’ he says.
Four years later, when the tsunami hit Sri Lanka on Boxing Day, the Metropolitan Police were sending people over to help identify the thousands of dead. Mo had successfully identified people in Kosovo – from the fully skeletonised, to the hardly touched – so they sent him, putting him in charge of the process across all nationalities. Mo was there for six months, getting very little sleep. All the while, he was meeting other disaster response people, working with the same guys who would eventually, years later, pull him out of his brief police retirement and give him a permanent role here at Kenyon.
It’s a couple of weeks after the open day and everything here is quieter now. We’re sitting in his office and Mo is talking me through some of the other cases he’s worked on: the Germanwings crash into the Alps in 2015, the mass shooting in Tunisia that left thirty-eight dead in 2015, the 2016 Egyptair Flight 804 that plummeted into the Mediterranean Sea killing everyone on board, and the Emirates plane that crashed at Dubai airport in 2016 but killed just one person on the ground. He says the most obvious failing in every airline’s disaster response plan, if they have one, is they all expect the crash to happen at their own airport. No one accounts for the infrastructure or wealth, or lack of each, of another country.
There are framed photos of his time in the police, and knickknacks on the shelves beside mass fatality manuals. I point at one, a beaten-up padlock with a scuffed handwritten label hanging on a small varnished wooden stand, and ask about it. ‘That’s the padlock that we took off on the last day in Sri Lanka,’ he says, as he brings it down off the shelf and places it between us on the table. It came from one of the forty-foot refrigerated shipping containers – like the kind you see on the back of a lorry – that held the unidentified bodies recovered after the tsunami in 2004. When the last body was identified, when the containers, after six harrowing months, were empty, the coroner of Sri Lanka gifted him the final padlock. ‘It was a pretty significant time for us all,’ he says, ‘to realise that we’d got through the task and we’d laid those people to rest.’
A total of 227,898 people died in the tsunami as the colossal waves rolled over coastlines in Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and South Africa. Over thirty thousand died in Sri Lanka alone. The local authorities moved quickly to bury the bodies – fearing that leaving them where they lay, in the tropical heat, would be a health hazard to the living. They put them in mass graves, many beside hospitals, with a view to them being exhumed by international authorities in search of their own. ‘The authorities in Sri Lanka didn’t want to go through a mass identification for their nationals,’ explains Mo. ‘Many were Buddhists, Hindus – they were happy that those people had been buried in mass graves. But by the same token, the authorities and the government there knew that the foreigners wouldn’t understand that culture. They wouldn’t want to be left in those graves. So they tried to preserve where the obvious foreigners were buried, and said they would work with us to identify them.’
Rotating teams of UK police and forensic officers investigated where the mass graves containing foreigners might be and exhumed them. About 300 bodies filled the seven refrigerated containers, all unidentified, awaiting post-mortems. Ante-mortem information – meaning pre-death – was collected across the nationalities to match up to the bodies in the containers: dental, DNA, fingerprints. But collecting ante-mortem information for hundreds of missing foreigners is no small feat: at the Kenyon open day, Mo had shown us how it was done. He had told us that you don’t know what state the body will be in if and when you find it, so you need every piece of information you can get, about every piece of that body. It’s great if somebody has a tattoo on their arm, but what if you don’t find their arm? Similarly, you might think a tattoo is unique, and then discover – as with a Wile E. Coyote tattoo in a past case – that it’s the mascot of a Marine Transport Squadron and hundreds of men have it. The co-mingling of personal effects in an explosion or crash means a wallet with an ID card found on a body might not be that body’s wallet. You have to question everything. As an exercise, Mo had made us team up with the person beside us and role play the collection of ante-mortem information. He told us to record any medical implants – pacemakers, breasts – citing their unique and traceable serial numbers as invaluable: he recently identified someone on the basis of a prosthetic patella. That is to say, the most identifiable part of the man was his kneecap. In the role play, I pretended to be my mother providing information on me, and the quiet fire warden beside me assumed the role of Kenyon staff. I counted the two screws in each leg from knee surgeries, a faded birthmark on my left thigh, the scar on my wrist from when I smashed a window in a teenage rage, and the white line on my shoulder from when I crashed my pink tricycle into a wheelie bin. It’s here, answering questions that might help in my body’s identification, that I realise I don’t tell my family anything: they don’t know who my GP is, my dentist, they don’t know if or when I’ve had blood samples taken or needed medical intervention, they don’t know if I’ve submitted my DNA to some genetic ancestry test like 23andMe, or whether I’ve ever needed a fingerprint to enter a building I work in. I pictured my parents offering the family liaison officer patchy bits of information like fluff from their pockets. I pictured mortuary staff sorting through the pieces, trying to find those childhood scars. It seemed, to me, to be an expensive undertaking, in both money and time.
‘Was it purely out of religious reasons that the local authorities were content to leave their own unidentified?’ I ask Mo now in his office. ‘Or was it because the victims were poor?’
‘There’s definitely a political aspect,’ he says. ‘Far fewer people died in Thailand, yet there was a huge international effort in Thailand. Why? Because they decided to try and identify everyone, and that took eighteen months to two years to do. How much of that was because so many of the people there were rich tourists?’ He gives a small shrug, as if to say it always comes down to money, and the money isn’t always up to him. ‘That meant there was more international focus on them. Politics is completely involved in the funding and the approach to a disaster.’
Another case where the poverty of the locals came into play was the Philippines. Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded, made landfall in November 2013, when it threw cars like stones, flattened buildings and washed whole towns away. It killed at least 6,300 people in the Philippines alone. A city administrator estimated that 90 per cent of the city of Tacloban had been obliterated. This was where Mo and his team headed in the immediate wake of the storm: a ruined city so devastated that two years later Pope Francis would visit and lead mass for 30,000 people in front of the airport as a hope-raising exercise.
I tell Mo that I remember reading in the New York Times that bodies were left out for weeks, and he looks away like he still doesn’t believe what he saw. ‘Hayley, I’ve got pictures,’ he says. He steps behind his desk and, after some searching and cursing – ‘Jesus, how many bloody presentations have I done in my time?’ – brings up a PowerPoint display on his computer. Here are the operation headquarters: the disused building with one toilet, with the tents and flimsy gazebos that served as their temporary mortuary, put up by local authorities using whatever they could find. There were no official temporary mortuary supplies in the area, and no refrigeration. ‘I ♥ TACLOBAN’ is printed on one of the gazebos. Beside it, a marshy field, dense with mosquitoes, where body bags were lined up in their thousands, bursting in the heat. The rate of decomposition in a place as hot as Tacloban was high – the average temperature at the time was 27 degrees Celsius, with humidity at 84 per cent – and the gases were causing the plastic to tear, spilling contents into puddles in the field. I ask Mo what the smell was like and he pauses, like he’s never stopped to consider it. ‘I don’t think I’ve got a very good sense of smell, actually,’ he says, looking up from his screen. ‘It probably helps in my job. Although, in Sri Lanka, there was the sweet smell of death for a whole fourteen-hour car journey.’
Further on, more photographs: here’s Mo personally fishing three bodies out of a lagoon in the Philippines. The typhoon didn’t leave the bodies here: it was a local policeman trying to help. The bodies had been out in the open, decomposing – he was trying to save the survivors from the smell, the sight, the horror. So he disposed of them in the nearest water source, succeeding only in poisoning it for everyone nearby. They’re bloated, pale, face down in the water. Using two planks of wood, one at the pelvis, the other under the arms, a limp body is lifted out and brought to the shore by kayak. The skin along the back is smooth and puffy, but the front of the body is skeletal, the face nibbled off by creatures. ‘We’ve recovered air-disaster victims with shark bites taken out of them,’ said Mo, clicking through the slides – nature just gets on with it. Here are the bodies laid out on a tarpaulin. Here’s Mo lifting the leg of a victim, pointing at the blue rope that the policeman thought would tie the body to the bottom of the lagoon and make it disappear.
He’s clicking through the photographs faster now, trying to show me what he means when he said he looked across the field of body bags and thought to himself, I don’t think I’ll solve this one. These photos were taken a week after the storm took those lives, and already the bags are full of brown soup, creamy ribcages jutting above the slop, maggots visible in the mix. Skulls, stripped of their defining flesh features, lank hair pasted over cheek and eye. More bloated corpses in their swimming costumes, now so far from the beach. Adults, children. I’ve been listening to Mo talk about his job for hours, but in looking at these photos, only now can I begin to fathom how difficult identification is. These are not drowned people pulled from a lake: this is decaying meat and bone; there are no faces, let alone tattoos. On the positive side, at least this person is all here: they are not in forty-seven pieces picked from the rubble of a plane crash. This is not, in theory, a hopeless situation – bodies like this can still be matched by DNA or dental records. But Typhoon Haiyan took not only their lives but their houses, and with them any possible chance of collecting ante-mortem information that could have been matched up with the dead: any strands of hair, any toothbrushes that could be mined for genetic code, any mirrors or door handles recording the unique whorls of their fingerprints. And the poorer the person, the less likely they are to visit a dentist. No one here beeped their way into a high-rise office building by pressing their thumb to a scanner.
Nevertheless, there was a mortuary team from the Philippines working through the thousands of dead at a rate of about fifteen people per day, collecting post-mortem information that would never, and likely could never, be matched up to information that might identify them. They were going through the motions without considering whether any of it would mean anything. Mo decided it was inhumane to leave these bodies rotting for as long as the local authorities did: there was no proper plan in place for identification, no international government interest, and therefore no money. It was needless horror in a situation that was already emotionally sensitive to the survivors.
‘Full respect to those who were trying it, but I identified it as being an impossible task. I tried to get them to bury them in individual graves, maybe take a tooth or something,’ he says – a tooth being the easiest thing to keep, a vague hope that maybe some identification might be possible rather than nothing at all. ‘In the end, all the internationals went home for Christmas, and they brought in the JCBs, the big digging machines, and buried them. They realised they couldn’t do any more.’
Months ago in south London we carefully laid Adam out in the spring-lit mortuary, delicately removing and folding his T-shirt for his family to collect. Thinking back to him now, sitting here with Mo, I am struck by the huge gulf between what ‘methodical’ means in a quiet, expected death and ‘methodical’ in a mass-fatality situation – the consideration of the individual versus what is the best you can do with what you’ve got. It changes with every disaster, but there are some fundamentals that are immovable – all learned, as with most of these things, through what others did wrong.
In 1989, a boat sank on the Thames. It was the Marchioness, a small party boat that once helped rescue men in the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation. It collided with a huge dredger called the Bowbelle in the middle of the night, took thirty seconds to sink, left fifty-one dead (most of them under the age of thirty) and led to an official change in the way bodies were treated in the aftermath of a disaster, because the aftermath itself was a disaster too. According to Richard Shepherd, the forensic pathologist in charge of London and southeast England at the time, it was one of a series of disasters that revolutionised things: train collisions, shooting sprees, a lit match dropped through an escalator at King’s Cross Station (every week I walk past a plaque in the station commemorating the people who died there). All of these and more led to the deaths of hundreds and exposed major systems failures. Corporate and state attitudes to training, risk and responsibility, health and safety – everything had to be overhauled.
Mo didn’t work on the Marchioness case; he was a young police constable on a different patch when it happened. But pulling a binder off his bookshelf, Public Inquiry into the Identification of Victims following Major Transport Accidents: Report of Lord Justice Clarke, released eleven years after the Marchioness disaster, he explains how the sinking of that boat sent ripples through the following decades. At the root of it was the removal of the victims’ hands.
‘When homeless people – we used to call them vagrants in those days – fell into the Thames, and were fished out maybe two or three days later, they would be quite bloated and unrecognisable,’ Mo explains. ‘As anyone would be, in the water.’ Death, however recent, changes how people look, which is why relying solely on visual identification is neither possible nor wise. According to the forensic pathologist Bernard Knight CBE, who is quoted in the report, it’s a common occurrence for close relatives to have doubts about, deny or mistakenly agree to the identity of a deceased person – even in freshly dead bodies. The effects of gravity on the features, the flattening of parts of the body that had contact with hard surfaces, swelling and pallor all work to distort the person as you might have known them. When the dynamic element of a person is gone – how they held their face, how they moved and made eye contact – sometimes what is left is unrecognisable.
Generally speaking, the kind of person who would be pulled out of the Thames tended to be someone who had been picked up by the police while alive – their fingerprints were already on the database, so they could, theoretically, be identified by prints alone in a short amount of time. But when a body has been in the water, it’s not so easy a task: the skin becomes wrinkly like it does after a long bath, it turns white no matter what your ethnicity. Fingerprints become invisible. ‘So what they’d do is they would remove the hands,’ says Mo. ‘They’d then take the hands to a drying cabinet in a fingerprint laboratory. After the hands had dried out, they could take the fingerprints.’
What happened in the Marchioness investigation was they applied small-time identification tactics on a massive scale, and to a group of people who were unlikely to have had their fingerprints on the database. The waterlogged skin was loosening and beginning to detach from the fingers, so it was becoming harder to get the prints they believed they needed. A laboratory in Southwark had more sophisticated fingerprinting equipment than the mortuary, but there were no facilities to handle the bodies. So, as with the individual cases of bodies in the Thames, they took only the hands.
The removal of the hands snowballed into larger problems: uninformed families seeing the bodies of their dead inexplicably handless, and mortuaries finding lost hands in the corners of freezers years after the rest of the body had been buried or cremated. ‘They were carrying out processes to lead to the identification all in good faith, but it probably wasn’t done in a coordinated way,’ figures Mo, and his reasoning is backed up in Clarke’s inquiry. Fifty-six pages of the Clarke report investigate every step that led to the decision to sever the hands. The other 200 or so are laying out guiding principles for the future: how bodies should be identified, who has the power to do what, and how the bereaved families are to be treated and what they are to be told.
‘Now we’ll have what’s called an identification standard. Usually DNA, fingerprints, dental will be sufficient on their own as long as there are no exclusionary factors and no unexplainable discrepancies – I’ve had DNA back from people in the mortuary where I can see that it’s a woman but a man’s DNA has come back because of contamination. You have to consider all the pathology in the round.’
After the Marchioness disaster, some families were allowed to see their dead and others were refused access. Funeral directors and the police claimed that they were advised not to let the families see the bodies, even when the families were insistent that they wanted to. The pathologist, Shepherd, only learned about this later, and speculates that whoever made this decision probably did it with ‘misplaced compassion’ – the belief that seeing the body in its decomposed state would only upset the families more than they already were. ‘However,’ Shepherd wrote in his memoir Unnatural Causes, ‘that person clearly did not know that not seeing them is even worse.’
I ask Mo about viewing the bodies. Given everything he’s shown me, would he ever stop a family from seeing what he sees?
‘In this country, there’s a right for people to view bodies,’ he says. ‘It might be a body that is covered, and you just need to be there with them. Maybe part of the body or the face is shown. But because of the type of incidents that we deal with – which are high levels of fragmentations and perhaps the tiniest part of human remains – we will advise families, at an early stage, that the body is unlikely to be suitable for viewing. But we’ll explain why, and that’s not the same as denying them.’
In the explaining of why, family liaison officers have to be honest. After a plane crash, families are asked if they would like to be notified every time a new piece of a person is identified: would you like another call when they find the forty-seventh piece, or is the first one – the positive identification – enough? Some families might be offered a lock of hair to keep, but others might not. How can you offer a lock of hair if you do not find the head? Religious traditions might not be able to be carried out simply because there is not enough of the body there to do it. If you are not truthful about a situation, families cannot understand.
‘In Egypt, after MS804, when I first got access to where the bodies were, sixty-six bodies were in three domestic five-drawer fridges. The largest body part was the size of an orange. And the most parts of human remains that were attributed to one individual were five. That did cause difficulties with the Muslim faith, when the family wanted to be present and wash the remains. You are talking about a sample in a sample pot. Nevertheless, the identification of someone and the presence of some of their body is very important.’
Back at the Kenyon open day, after a coffee break, Gail Dunham stepped up to the lectern to give a speech. She was a lady in her mid-seventies, with waves of neat grey hair and an array of brooches, both pretty and placard-y, decorating her lapels. She had been sitting alone all day, a few chairs away from various airline representatives, and stuck out as an anomaly in a room of suits. She is the executive director of the National Air Disaster Alliance/Foundation, a group formed by the families of air crash survivors and victims to raise the standard of aviation safety, security and survivability, and to support victims’ families. Kenyon were visibly thrilled to have her there, a straight-talking, polite woman who is both knowledgeable about the way the airlines work (she worked for American Airlines for twenty-seven years), and deeply familiar with how it feels to lose someone in a plane crash and be treated badly by the airline. In March 1991, United Airlines Flight 585, a Boeing 737-200, was approaching Colorado Springs to land when it rolled to the right, pitched nose-down until near vertical and hit the ground. Footage from the crash site, a local park south of the airport, shows a black burn, singed grass and pieces of plane so small and splintered it’s as if the aircraft evaporated. Two crew members, three flight attendants and twenty passengers were killed; nobody on board survived the impact. Dunham’s ex-husband, and father to her daughter, was the captain on that plane. As an insider and a bereaved outsider, her sole purpose at the open day was to speak directly to the representatives of hundreds of airlines, gathered as they were in this room, to plead with them to stop using the word ‘closure’ – an insurance company word that means nothing. Nobody ever gets it. A crash never ends.
If closure is an unattainable point of reckoning, what does the presence of a body add to the new version of normal that is a living victim’s life? What are we looking for, and how would a body help in finding it? It’s a given we want the body back, and nobody questions it. But many struggle to look at it, some refuse. For some, religious belief places little significance in the body at all: the soul is gone, the empty vessel is less important than the spiritual idea of a person existing in another, better place. In a mass fatality, in wars, in natural or man-made disasters, millions are spent on returning bodies to families, whether whole or in pieces. What for? What does the presence of a body mean at a funeral if the coffin could be empty and no one would know but the pallbearers?
After General Franco’s death in 1975, following nearly four decades of dictatorship, the Spanish government decided that instead of trawling through the crimes of the past – which historians have called the ‘Spanish Holocaust’, with a body count of hundreds of thousands – they would focus purely on the future of Spain. They voted to put in place a Pact of Forgetting, a kind of legislated amnesia, an amnesty law that meant nobody would be prosecuted for the mass suffering under Franco’s rule, that the country would simply move on. Unlike Germany, they would not turn their own concentration camps into museums of remembrance or try officials before courts – the streets named in their honour would stay, the officials would remain in power, the slate would be wiped clean. It also meant that anyone who was thrown into a mass grave by Franco’s soldiers would stay there; digging them up would be literally digging up the past, and it was forbidden by law to do so. Some of the surviving relatives of victims knew vaguely where the bodies were buried and flung flowers over walls or zip-tied them to roadside crash barriers. They were drawn to the places they believed their people were. Ascensión Mendieta was ninety-two when her father was finally located, in 2017, thrown into one of Spain’s many mass graves after being killed by firing squad in 1939. When she heard the news that the grave was going to be exhumed (following a court case in Argentina, because crimes against humanity can be tried anywhere in the world, which helps if the state that committed them is suppressing cases by law) and that her father would be identified by DNA, she said, ‘Now I can die happily. Because now I know I’ll see him, even in a bone, or an ash.’
Mendieta died a year after her father was found in the cemetery where he was shot, where bullet holes were still visible on the walls. She had been campaigning all her life to get his bones back.
Seeing the body is a signpost, a mark on the trail of grief. The consoling tell the grieving that a person isn’t really dead as long as you keep them alive in your mind, and this is true in more ways than the consoling person might intend. Without seeing your son’s remains, or your dead infant’s, they remain alive somehow, psychologically, in a way that all rational thought cannot defeat. In a plane crash, you could almost fool yourself that they are out there somewhere, that they survived the impact and washed up on a tropical island, that they are still manoeuvring rocks and logs to spell out SOS on the beach, waiting to be found. Without a body, you are caught in a twilight of death, without the complete darkness you need to reach acceptance.
‘It’s the limbo that people are in during this time that is so difficult,’ says Mo. ‘Not knowing where the body is. Not knowing if their loved one is going to be identified, even. Not knowing when they can have them back. It doesn’t give those important staging posts that we have with normal death. A normal death might be a family member who you see getting ill before your eyes, who dies within hospital, and you’re able to go to their funeral. And maybe they themselves speak to their family before they die. That’s what’s so difficult about homicides too: homicides are sudden and unexpected death. And in the same way that I did for homicide, I would tell a person, “Look, I’m going to do everything I can to try and find out what happened, to tell you what happened.” This is the same type of drive, really. What’s happened? How can I give you the truth? And sometimes that truth’s pretty horrible. But the families want to know the truth, and we tell them everything.’ You cannot give the families everything they want, but in recovering a body you can give them what they need to recover themselves.
The contents of Mo’s go-bag are lined up on the carpet now, next to an empty brown leather carry-on. He’s waiting for DNA results on victims in a plane crash. Tomorrow morning he’ll fly to America to look in every body bag and make sure everything that is supposed to be there is there. On the blank Kenyon-branded labels in a sandwich bag on the floor, Mo will write the names of the identified people himself. He’s been calling family members to tell them what he knows and talk them through the next steps – cremations, burials, it’s all up to them. When the victim is released from the mortuary, Mo will be there. The casket will be the length and shape of a normal casket. Inside, just a small bag of pieces.
I want to know how all of this affects Mo, what it does to his psyche to see people piled in their mass graves, rotting in their body bags or sealed in pots. He says he feels no differently about death. ‘Death is a part of living,’ he says. ‘That’s one of the things that we do.’ But his work has changed his priorities. You cannot see what he has seen and still think the same things matter. Prior to the tsunami in Sri Lanka, Mo says he was great at the bureaucracy that comes with working in the police service: the forms, the rules, the regulations. When he returned, it ceased to be important. ‘It probably did a lot of damage to my career. Things just for the show, the gloss? Didn’t care. I wasn’t angry, I just wouldn’t do it.’
His work has also given him a greater understanding of what people can handle emotionally, mentally, physically. Sri Lanka left one of his workers with PTSD, such that he’ll likely never work again. ‘I failed on that,’ says Mo, bluntly and seriously. ‘He worked non-stop for me without any days off for about three weeks. He was too fragile a person to have been sent in the first place.’ There was a payout from the Home Office, in lieu of the aftercare he should have had. Kenyon is careful about which workers they take on a job, and there is mental-health support during the work and when it’s over. Mo is currently arranging a debrief for the people on the Grenfell case. And after an experience in Kosovo – watching a volunteer on the exhumation team climb into the mass grave and retch every day for two weeks, refusing to quit – he knows there is a difference between wanting to go and actually being strong enough to do the job. Workers need to have the practical skills to assist, but they also need to be emotionally resilient: they cannot have suffered recent loss, they cannot be someone who has decided they are on a crusade to right wrongs they have experienced in their own lives.
He himself hasn’t totally escaped the overwhelming nature of the job: in 2009, pre-Kenyon, he was deployed by the police to Brazil, to work on identifying the victims of the Air France 447 crash that left 228 dead. It was his first plane crash. His boss said he had to be back in time for his on-call shift in homicide, so he landed at Heathrow at 6 a.m. and drove straight to work, crashing his car on the way. ‘My worlds had changed. My concentration wasn’t on it. People need time to rest and recuperate after these.’
But Mo doesn’t seem to rest. He says he’s busy all the time. Unlike other people who worked with him in Sri Lanka – who never worked on another mass fatality, and organise an annual barbecue to check in with each other – Mo went to another big job, and then another. He keeps his shoes on during every flight, knows where his exits are and always watches the safety video to the end. And now he’s here, working in an office where we’re sitting just feet away from a warehouse holding the blackened possessions of people who burned to death in their beds. Like Nick Reynolds, the death mask sculptor, I wonder if everything would catch up with him if he ever sat still and thought about it. ‘Now you’re starting to sound like my wife,’ he grins.
As I start putting my stuff in my bag and readying myself to leave, Mo asks me if anyone else I’ve spoken to has given me a good answer for why it is they do what they do. He’s changed a bit since I arrived, he’s less impish, he’s looking reflective. We’ve been here for hours trying to figure out why he can do what he does; he insists that he’s just ‘a simple bloke’ with nothing deeper to find, no big reason why he’s ended up here. ‘I’m pretty sure that under my superficial surface, all you’ll find is more superficiality,’ he keeps joking, drinking tea out of a mug that says ‘PERFECT DAUGHTER’. But he tells me apropos of nothing that he has no unsolved murders. On his wall behind him is a framed quote from William Gladstone: ‘Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness, the tender mercy of its people, their respect for the law of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.’
I tell him that over the past months, I’ve been given many reasons from people who think they have no reasons, but they all boil down to this: they are trying to help, and they are trying to do what they believe is right. They cannot reverse the situation and make people live again, but they can change how it is dealt with and give them dignity in death. I tell him about Terry in the Mayo Clinic, staying up late in the anatomy lab, waiting to swap the faces back even though no one would ever notice if he didn’t. Mo nods silently, leans forward in his chair, the last mortuary padlock still between us. ‘People deserve their identity, even after death. You know?’