1. Getting a job in a butcher’s shop

WHEN I was about 12-years-old my father asked me what I was going to do for a job. I thought he meant when I was grown up but he meant right then. He had a Scottish Presbyterian upbringing and wanted me to learn the work ethic.

He also told me half of my wage had to go to my mother for board and lodging. I earned £6 so I gave £3 to her. That was my responsibility and I never missed a Saturday because if I missed it my mother would not get her money. So it instilled in me a sense of responsibility to work and pay my own way.

When I left home to go to university I found that my mother had put the money in the bank and she gave it back to me which was a huge surprise.

The work ethic has stayed with me ever since and I loved working in the butcher’s shop. I learned how to link sausages which I am sure is a skill everybody should learn! They would let me cut things and I knew I was never going to be squeamish around blood, muscle and bone. It also made me comfortable talking to the public which is an invaluable life skill. Being able to communicate with a range of people and the precision of anatomy have stayed with me.

2. My biology teacher

DOCTOR Archie Fraser was the head of biology at Inverness Royal Academy (pictured) and I absolutely adored him. As a teacher, he made everything seem logical. While I was at school, I did some work experience at the hospital medical laboratory, and then told him that was what I wanted to do when I left.

He looked at me over his glasses and said, “Don’t be stupid – you are going to university”. I did not know I could.

Nobody in the family had been and I had assumed I would just leave school and get a job. Dr Fraser was exactly what a teacher should be.

Someone who recognises the potential in a child when the child can’t see it and the parents don’t know what opportunities there are. I applied but didn’t tell my parents, as I expected to be rejected. When I was accepted, I lied to them and told them I had got a full grant, because I had decided they could not afford to support me and I would get jobs, which is what I did.

3. Leaving home and going to University

I APPLIED to Aberdeen as it was close but not too close to home. I was quite a naïve teenager. We did not go on holidays, as my father did not believe in them, but my grandmother had once taken me to Aberdeen on the train, so I knew it was close enough if I needed to go home.

I did not want to go any further. Edinburgh and Glasgow seemed too alien to me.

I went to university to study biology and going into third year we had to choose what to specialise in. I went to the anatomist and was told that we would dissect a human body. I thought about the butcher shop and decided I could do that so it was hugely influential in getting me into anatomy. I found university challenging but liberating. I did not have to be accountable to anyone else but had to take responsibility for myself.

Tom, my future husband, was also a student of anatomy so university was important in terms of my future life and family and in terms of my career and learning to be independent.

4. My first cadaver to dissect

I LOVED anatomy, and loved everything about it. I remember going to dissect that first day and seeing the cadaver. We named him Henry, after Henry Gray, a very important figure in anatomy.

That moment when you pick up the scalpel and make your first incision through human skin is a Rubicon you can’t recross. Once you have done that you are never the same again.

To be given permission by someone who is now dead for you to open them up and study them is the most tremendous gift anyone could give.

We were aware of the enormity of the responsibility we had been given and felt we had to study and learn, as his death was allowing us to have this experience. It took us a full year to dissect him, as you do it in the minutest detail, looking at every muscle, every blood vessel and every nerve. It was just fascinating.

The really difficult thing is making the first incision, but five minutes later you have forgotten to be scared. All you are doing is learning about anatomy.

Val McDermid came into the mortuary once to do a piece for radio and was quite nervous about it.

She had had both her knees replaced, so I found a cadaver with knee replacements and she quickly forgot what she was looking at and became interested in the joints. It is just getting people past that initial stage.

5. My first forensic post-mortem

WHEN I finished my fourth year, my Professor of Anatomy suggested I do a PhD. I have a morbid fear of rodents and did not want a research project that had anything to do with rats or mice, so I chose human identification.

This was in the days before we had DNA as a forensic tool. While I was doing the PhD, a microlight pilot crashed off the coast of Inverbervie. A couple of weeks later they found a body which was not in the best state of preservation and was missing the head, hands and feet, so could not be identified easily. My supervisor was called in and asked if I wanted to go along.

I had been in a butcher shop and mortuary, but I did wonder if I could do it. It wasn’t pretty and there is a very offensive smell when you have a body so badly decomposed, but I did not find it so noxious I could not cope.

I focused on what had to be done and became totally engrossed in the puzzle, rather than being affected by the environment. We found a birthmark under his left nipple, so we went to his mother, who said he had no blemishes – but then we asked his girlfriend, who said he did have one there, and the Procurator Fiscal was happy to release the body on that basis.

That was about 1983, and Alec Jeffreys’s eureka moment with DNA was 1984, which changed the world.

6. Kosovo

THIS was a huge change, because up until that point every case I had done was a single case. When I went out I did not know what I was going out to. I had watched the news and knew there were mass fatalities, and I knew the UN was out there to recover remains and needed forensic teams to collect evidence so they could take cases to court, but until I experienced it I did not know what it meant to go out and work in that environment. The first crime scene was an outhouse where 44 men aged 14-85 had been shot. The outhouse had then been burned and the bodies had become a food source for packs of dogs.

So there were badly burnt, decomposing remains, all piled on top of each other, and we first had to identify what was a person, then who that person might have been. This was to show that those being murdered were not combatants and that this was genocide.

At the first scene there were no women, but later we came across women and children assassinated by Serbian militia. We worked in blistering heat in rubber wellies and scene-of-crime suits for 12 hours a day. It was exhausting, but we were determined to do the work with integrity and the standards we would use at home. I would not trade the experience, as it reminded me of what is important in life. Who cares if your car has a scratch when these people lost everything – their families, homes, possessions and dignity.

It was a real moment of humanitarian awakening and definitely changed my perspective on how I live my life.

7. The first paedophile case

UNTIL 2006 all my work had been about identifying the deceased, but in Kosovo I met a Metropolitan police photographer. He asked if I would like to look at the case of a young teenage girl who said her father was coming into her bedroom at night and sexually abusing her.

She told her mother, but she refused to believe her, so the girl left her Skype running on her computer. She got pictures of an arm and hand doing what she said was happening, but her mother still refused to believe it, and the girl went to the police.

At night Skype operates in an infrared mode and the infrared reacts with the deoxygenated blood in the veins and makes them stand out like black tramlines. The pattern of veins is really variable in that part of the limb and are not even the same on each hand in each individual.

I compared the vein pattern in the pictures with the suspect and found they matched, but did not know if this would be accepted as evidence in the courts.

It had never been presented in a UK courtroom before but the judge allowed it.

However, the jury found the father not guilty. I was very taken aback. The girl had been very brave but god knows what her life was like after that.

I set about getting more research to convince juries about the likelihood of individuals having the same veins.

In paedophilic images, contact with the child is what is recorded, and you can often see their hands and arms.

Now 82% of cases like this result in a change of plea, which saves a lot of time and money – and means the victim does not have to give evidence in court.

8. Marriage and family

TOM and I were at school and university together, but he eventually decided anatomy was not for him and did a post grad in business and finance. He has been a director of a significant number of companies over the years. We decided we would share responsibility for our three girls, and I have been incredibly fortunate, especially when I needed to go away on tours. He was responsible for the children at those times and as a result has an incredible relationship with them.

9. Setting up CAHID and getting a Queen’s Award

DUNDEE approached me in 2003 and said they wanted someone to run the anatomy department . The clinching moment was when they said I could do what I liked with it. At the time there were three staff and they taught about 100 students. When I left last August, the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID) had 18 staff and close to 600 students every year. We opened an undergraduate department in forensic anthropology. We won the Queen’s Award for Excellence, the first time it was given to a department like ours. It was tremendous fun.

10. The death of my parents

MY mother’s liver failed at 72. On her last Saturday, when we visited her with the girls, she was largely comatose. We sang every song she loved. If the last thing my mother could hear on Earth was us singing and laughing – then what a way to go. My father died shortly afterwards. He had Alzheimer’s and was in a care home. We all sat with him through the night and he took his last breath while we held his hand. When he left the world he knew the people around him loved him.