'I'm a crime scene cleaner – growing up in Wales prepared me for grim work'

Rotting bodies, blood-soaked walls and carpets writhing with maggots are all part of a typical day for Ben Giles, who left his career as a window cleaner to become one of Britain's most in-demand crime scene cleaners. Ben's work can be extraordinarily lucrative – he can pocket over £2,000 for just a couple of hours on the job. However, unsurprisingly, it's not a profession suited to everyone. One particularly unforgettable case involved him cleaning the home of a man who had died and remained undiscovered for six weeks. The solicitor overseeing the deceased man's estate informed him: "His dog has been in there with him and has eaten his face and most of one of his legs." Given the nature of his work, Ben frequently encounters corpses. While police will have removed the body before his arrival in certain instances, he will often have to work around the deceased. He told us: "If you've got a hoarder and their property's fallen in on them, then you have to uncover the body for SOCO to come in and take photos of it. "And then they will send an undertaker in to take the body away. It still makes me kind of giggle a little bit that they send two doctors in to confirm someone's dead, even though they've been there for 10 weeks." Maintaining a solid professional relationship with an undertaker is absolutely vital, Ben adds. "Sometimes you get an undertaker who is absolutely amazing, or the coroner's office will send someone in who polythenes absolutely everything to death, and there's no trace of even how they've extracted the corpse out of the room," he continues. "But other times we'll go to a very rural setting where there's still a lot of the person left. And by law, all of the body parts have to be buried, or cremated, with the deceased." Tragically, Ben reveals he's being summoned to an increasing number of suicides, explaining: "I would love to say that humans are getting better, but in our industry, we're at the coal face... we're cleaning between 15 and 20 suicides a week at the moment, that's unprecedented.." One particular job has remained with him: "Probably one of the worst I did was a 16-year-old boy who committed suicide with a shotgun. That was pretty tragic – and and the fallout from a shotgun, as you can imagine, is just horrendous. "You're picking up hair, pieces of skull – you even find earlobes with earrings still in them and all this kind of stuff and everything's embedded into walls. So you've got to dig stuff out." It was the teenager's age that stunned Ben, he remembers: "He wasn't allowed to drink alcohol or to drive a car, but he's allowed to have a gun because he was a member of a gun club. "He fell out with his girlfriend and his mum and dad were watching TV in the room below [when it happened] and that stands out as a really difficult one." While Ben typically maintains professional distance while working, it's impossible to entirely disconnect from the genuine tragedies he encounters daily. He remembers one especially harrowing scene. "We had one case where a lady was bludgeoned to death by her husband," he said. "She had survived on the kitchen floor for three days, and then sadly passed away in the ambulance, going to hospital. "That was pretty traumatic because we we arrived on that third day and we were told she'd passed away." Ben was raised on a farm in West Wales, and he suggests that background proved invaluable in preparing him for his unconventional profession. He continues: "My upbringing was pretty gopping, if I'm honest with you. I was surrounded by filth and animal faeces and animal body fluids, all kind of through my childhood." Wearing protective equipment also helps shield him from the sensations and odours associated with decomposing remains: "Until you take the mask off," he adds, "then the outside of the mask stinks." The emotional toll of cleaning a room where someone has passed away doesn't always become apparent until well after the event, however. He adds: "I switched off to most of it, and then when I started writing the book,I'd sat on a balcony in Tenerife with a glass of wine and a lump of cheese, and thought, 'Right, OK, I'll start writing my memoirs, and I just started thinking about all of these people and the families, and I'd never really given myself time to do that. "I ended up bawling my eyes out... just realising the reality of how traumatic those scenes must have been for that family." The Specialist: How to clean a crime scene and other messes by Ben Giles (HarperNorth) is out now. Ben Giles is appearing at How to Clean a Crime Scene event at Cheltenham Science Festival on 2 June. www.cheltenhamfestivals.org