The skeleton is key to solving past mysteries

One hot summer’s morning, as a nine-year-old girl living on the rim of a Scottish loch in the hotel owned by her parents, Sue Black was unaware she was about to ‘leave those days of innocence behind’. A man delivering groceries sexually assaulted her. Many years later, Black imagines how this unspeakable childhood trauma might have been written into her very bones. Extreme stress can cause a temporary halt in the growth of a child’s arms or legs, which leaves a ‘Harris line’ that is visible on X-ray. This white mark would have said what she couldn’t. The abuse remained secret for a decade, and when she finally told her mother, she wasn’t believed.

Black doubts how far her biography informed her career choice, but she has since dedicated herself to telling the stories hidden in the skeletons of society’s most vulnerable, resolute in her belief that there is ‘no part of the human anatomy that cannot be of some value to the identification of the victim, the prosecution of the guilty or the exoneration of the innocent’.