Ben can earn over £2,000 for a few hours’ work [stock image] (Image: Getty)
As a window-cleaner, Ben Giles was having to work virtually round the clock to scrape a living. He was working so many hours, in fact, that his wife came close to leaving him. But then, almost by accident, Ben found himself a new line of work where he could earn the equivalent of his monthly wage in just a few hours.
But it’s not a job for everybody. Ben explains that when he turns up for work he never knows quite what to expect. On one shocking occasion he was sent to clean a property, only to find a dead body that had remained undiscovered for 15 years. Reduced to a skeleton, Ben said, the body was “wearing an intact leather belt and leather shoes on its skeleton feet.”
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Bloodstained carpets are all in a day’s work for Ben (Image: Getty)
Shockingly, that’s not the grisliest thing Ben has seen in his career as a biohazard cleaner. In a Daily Mail extract from his upcoming book The Specialist, Ben recalled one job that affected him particularly deeply.
“It was a normal suburban house,” he said. “Neat and tidy. Coats on hooks. Keys in a bowl by the door. But the kitchen was carnage.”
It emerged that the man who had lived in the house had run amok and brutally killed his wife: “There was just so much blood,” Ben recalled.
“It was everywhere: along the top of the Venetian blinds, pooled in cutlery drawers, on the cupboards, on the floor, on the walls, on the worktops, on the door handles and even inside the washing machine. There were handprints, fingerprints, fine droplets from the violent swinging of an object covered in blood.”
What had horrified Ben so much was the everyday nature of the scene, the idea of a perfectly normal family life that had suddenly fractured into brutal murder: “Everything we clean up tells some sort of story, often of the last moments of a life,” he said.
Many of the locations Ben is sent to are swarming with flies (Image: Getty)
Ben had moved into crime-scene cleanup after being hired by a landlord to clean up a recently-vacated flat. “The tenant wasn’t the tidiest,” the owner had told him.
That proved to be something of an understatement. The bath was completely filled with urine and faeces. It was disgusting, smelly work. But for a few hours’ work Ben pocketed £2,000.
After that baptism of fire, Ben signed up for a course that sought him the grim basics of his new career. He learned about the grim realities of decomposition, the life-cycles of flies and maggots, and the deadly consequences of the rodent-borne disease hantavirus.
And now, he regularly cleans properties where something tragic has happened. In one case, he said, he cleaned the house of a man who had died and lain undiscovered for six weeks.
The solicitor who was administering the dead man’s estate told him “His dog has been in there with him and has eaten his face and most of one of his legs.”
But as grisly the task was, it was also immensely lucrative: “People don’t haggle about the cost,” he said. “They’re paying precisely so they don’t have to think about what the job entails.”