The great problem with programmes like Forensics: The Real CSI (BBC Two), which deliberately evoke CSI: Miami/New York/somewhere equally glamorous and free of gun control, is that real life just doesn’t have a big enough budget. It’s a bit drab, you know? A bit meh. The lighting isn’t great, the surfaces aren’t shiny enough and almost no one gets to deliver gnomic one-liners as he stands over a carefully arranged corpse and puts on his shades.
Art, in other words, has ruined us for life. Nearly 30 years ago, in his book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (before they turned it into Homicide: Life on the Street, the best police series ever made, even though it appears for some reason to have been largely written out of televisual history), David Simon noted police concerns that juries were becoming less willing to convict criminals because the evidence rarely seemed as plentiful or clear-cut as they were used to seeing on screen. Now, even documentaries seem lacking.
It is not that there was anything wrong with this tracing of two cases being investigated by Newcastle police and some of the 26 forensic specialists the Northumbrian force has at its disposal. It was a conscientious look at “the harvest” – the painstaking gathering of evidence in the immediate aftermath of an apparent crime – after two incidents on opposite sides of the city. One, a gun fired through the patio windows of a potential witness in an upcoming court case; the other, a bloodstained young man found dead in an equally bloodstained flat by the father who called round because his son had seemed worried last time they had met.
Samples of the shattered window glass are taken. The wadding and lead pellets from a shotgun cartridge are recovered. Unused cartridges are found outside and fast-tracked to the lab, where forensic examiner Sally Agnew gently swabs their outsides – hard enough to take off the most recent layer of DNA, assumed to be the shooter’s, not so hard that she gets the DNA of everyone else who has ever handled them too – while officers continue house-to-house inquiries, hoping for leads and a suspect whose double helices will match Agnew’s results and damn him.
Across town, Kathryn Bolam is the crime scene manager at the bloodied flat. The body, in its once-white T-shirt, is face down and half-hidden under a desk. Did he try to hide from an assailant, crawl there in his death throes, or was he pushed there? There are gouts and spatter in every room and a red-stained knife on the desk. His father waits outside, oddly calm. “It was worse after I found him,” he remembers. “I had just clicked into ‘get the police, get the ambulance’ … Days after, it came through that he was dead … You always expect to go after your children.”
Perimeters checked, noted and photographed, it is time to turn the body over. “Oh,” says Bolam softly. “It’s his neck. Deep. Deep.”
The body is taken to the morgue and forensic pathologist Nigel Cooper finds no defensive marks on the hands, and a number of tentative superficial wounds on the throat before the fatal cut. The blood in every room came from the man staggering around as he died. It is not murder but suicide.
So that is the how. His father can only guess at the why. “He lived by himself … he had dogs, but they can’t answer you back. It was loneliness must have driven him to it.”
Back at the shooting scene, progress has been made. A witness has provided a name, and a suspect eventually hands himself in. He admits nothing, but a mouth-swab determines that his DNA “is well-represented” in the mixed profile they got off all three cartridges. When they take his clothes for examination, a shard of glass falls out of his shoe. The CPS agrees he can be charged while the shard is examined. A forensic reporting officer takes us through the process of chipping away at it and a comparator fragment in the hope that their refractive indices will match. But because life does not have to wrap itself up neatly in 45-minutes-plus-ad-breaks – they do not. The case is holed beneath the waterline. The police have to settle for charging their suspect with illegal possession of a shotgun cartridge, which nets him a two-month sentence.
I fear we will live to see the day when a new police force is born, sponsored by a streaming service (deeper-pocketed than the BBC), with the express job of providing juicier endings for documentaries. Until then, for us, as for the good people of CSI: IRL, the frustrations of the job, the grief of the people left behind and a lot of patience must be the order of the day.
