Auriole Prince, 32, head of ID and reconstruction, National Missing Persons’ Helpline (NMPHL). Lives in Paddington, London, with boyfriend Jan, 30
8am: If work is tricky, I’ll wake thinking about it and stay in bed as long as possible.
Advertisement
10am-1pm: I work in the ID section of Missing Persons; we reconstruct the faces of decomposed bodies, age pictures of missing people to indicate what they look like now and cross-match details of people with our database. The goal is closure for the families of those missing. Our office is in East Sheen. There are newspaper cuttings and photographs of missing people on the walls; clay models of faces built over skull casts stand about the place. It’s quite an eerie environment. In the mornings we might go to the mortuary to see a body, before returning and building the face from clay. We’re artists rather than scientists.
1pm-6pm: I usually take lunch at my desk. In the afternoons I do artificial ageing using Photoshop software. I look at family photos and guess how they’ve aged, like a jigsaw. There’s no real science to it. We have an office meeting in the late afternoon.
Evenings: Chat with my boyfriend Jan; he’s very understanding and puts up with the morbid conversation over dinner. I go for a run, we might have friends round, then it’s TV in bed. I’m asleep by 11.30pm.
Advertisement
Time off: Five weeks a year, when I’ll try to turn off from work, unless I hear of anything, such as a disappearance on the radio, when I’ll go to work to try to meet a deadline for images. I feel a big responsibility; I’m dealing with people’s lives. The NMPHL funds me to do a postgraduate course in medical drawing, so I spend some of my weekend doing sketches of distended bowels or friends’ veruccas.
I’ve learnt to detach myself from work; I have to, as I’m dealing with sad things, such as the boy’s torso found in the Thames. Stupid things, like some sad, cheesy ad, will bring it all out. But I love my job; it’s hugely rewarding.
Interview by Stephen Collins
Advertisement
WORK ... 68%
LIFE ... 32%