DEATH is the raw material from which Professor Dame Sue Black sculpts the contours of a life. That unidentified body on the mortuary table will, under her hands and the tools of her profession, be revealed, perhaps, as a boy of 14, a victim of war crime, somebody’s brother, somebody’s son. She reunites the dead with their names, their families, their stories. She is a storyteller in flesh and bone. “Working every day with death as my companion, I have come to respect her,” Black writes in her newly published memoir All That Remains. “It is when she has done her job that I am permitted to do mine…”

We meet on a bright morning shortly before Easter in Black’s office at Dundee University’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, where she is director. Because she is moving out, to take up her new job as pro

vice-chancellor of engagement at Lancaster University, her room is tidier than usual. Yet some intriguing bits and pieces are still lying around. “Look,” she says, lifting a hunk of brownish bone from a table. This turns out to be the neck vertebrae of William Bury, who, in 1889, was the last man to be hanged in Dundee. “See, these are the fractures where the rope ploughed through.”

Black is 56. She is fond of describing herself as a “middle-aged, red-headed, irascible Celtic woman” and, while she is perfectly charming, one does come away with the impression that suffering fools is not among her specialisms. Maybe it’s the hair, but she has a rather daunting Tudor presence: Elizabeth I meets Henry VIII.

As one of the world’s leading anatomists and forensic anthropologists, her achievements are many, but it all goes back to a butcher shop in Inverness where, between the ages of 12 and 17, she had a Saturday job. She learned about tendons, joints, how to handle a knife. On cold days a good way to warm your hands was to slip them into a box of livers fresh from the slaughterhouse.

It was expected that she work both inside and outside the home. Black, who has an elder sister, has sometimes referred to a “no-nonsense Presbyterian” upbringing, which is shorthand for something which sounds almost militaristic. Her father, Alasdair Gunn, was a former regimental sergeant major. “My father never held my hand,” she says. “My father never told me that he loved me.” She states this without pity and insists she does not regard it as a lack. Her father wore “an emotional straitjacket”, she believes, and never treated her as a wee girl: “Maybe I was the boy he didn’t have.”

Empathy was regarded as weakness. Looking back, does she think that was a positive thing? “It was what my father thought was the right thing to do. He viewed life as difficult and challenging and his job was to prepare us for it… He didn’t want to produce daughters who needed other people. It wasn’t that he didn’t love us. I know that more than anything. But he couldn’t show it. And if you achieved something, he would find a way to denigrate it.”

Late last year, in a speech at St Andrews University on being awarded an honorary degree of doctor of medicine, Black advised the students in the audience that they should “work harder than anybody else works”. This advice, she acknowledges, comes straight from her father and from a feeling of inadequacy which she long ago internalised. “You never really got praised for anything because there was always an expectation you would do more.”

She shrugs. “I don’t feel I was hard done by. I feel the experience made me capable of doing what I do.”

A capacity for graft, an ability to clench and loosen her emotions as if they were muscles, to not feel in those moments when feeling might conflict with the dispassionate requirements of science – these qualities have been useful to Black in the killing fields of Kosovo, in tsunami-scoured Thailand, in viewing images of child abuse and trying to identify the abuser from the pattern of veins on their hands.

Her mother Isabel was the opposite – all leaky emotion; weepy, needy. Black found this difficult. Her desire to leave Inverness for university was, in part, about cutting those choking apron strings. She loved her mother but they were very different.

One of the most moving and interesting passages in All That Remains is Black’s account of her mother’s death. Black writes of her regret that she allowed her mother to die in hospital when she would rather have been cared for at home by family. This feels like a public confession of sorts and, although she does not commit the word to print, an expression of guilt. “Oh, I think so,” she agrees, adding that she had also found herself unable to tell her mother – as a last farewell – that she loved her. “Because I thought, ‘If I do that, I’m going to cry, and I can’t do that in front of my girls. I’ve got to be strong for them.’”

Did writing some of this down feel like an unburdening? “No. The guilt’s still there. That doesn’t go away. What I wanted was for my children to know that it’s okay to be honest about when you do things you regret. I wanted them to know it’s okay to say, ‘I got that wrong’.”

She was there for her father’s death. She had promised his mother she would be. Her paternal grandmother Margaret, a Gaelic speaker from Glenelg, told Black, when she was ten, that no one should die alone and so she should look after Alasdair as he approached the end. Margaret seems to have been an almost mystical figure. She believed in second sight and offered reassurance, in that same conversation, that death would not separate grandmother and granddaughter: she would sit on her left shoulder, and if Black ever needed advice, she should tilt her head and listen. Black has made it an almost daily practice, since Margaret’s passing, to do so.

Her first professional encounter with death came at Aberdeen University. She was to dissect the body of a man she named “Henry” who had died in his late seventies and bequeathed his body to the anatomy department. When Black speaks of this experience, at a distance of almost 40 years, she pinches together the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, as if holding the scalpel. It is clear she can feel it, see it. That first cut, through the skin above the breastbone, it seemed transgressive. “There’s almost a feeling of desecration.” It was also symbolic: passing from one layer of human experience to another, heading for the heart of what would become her life’s work.

She spent a year with Henry, exploring with a blade every detail of his body. That profound physical intimacy, the way she grew and learned as a result of their relationship, the pride she took in him for the generosity of his bequeathal – it sounds almost like a falling in love?

“In some ways,” she smiles. “It was a falling in love with a good friend. It was somebody who was a stranger when you started, but by the end you knew more about them than they knew themselves. That’s what friendship does. There’s an unspoken trust between the dissector and the dissected… The body is the most amazing gift that anybody can give. The only thing they ask is that you learn from them.”

Dundee University is bequeathed around 100 bodies annually, for teaching and research. Part of Black’s professional legacy will be the introduction, a few years ago, of an innovative type of embalming, known as the Thiel soft-fix method, and a new mortuary, named after her friend, the crime writer Val McDermid, who was heavily involved in fundraising for the centre. Black intends to leave her own remains to a Scottish anatomy department, probably Dundee, and would like her skeleton to become a teaching aid at the university. This is the only sort of life after death she expects to experience.

Her husband Tom Black does not want her to be dissected. In her St Andrews speech, she spoke lovingly of him. How, I ask, did they meet?

“We were in school together.” This was Inverness Royal Academy. “In first year at university we became inseparable friends. A year or so later we became more than friends.” But they split up in fourth year and during Black’s PhD she married someone else, taking the name MacLaughlin. “Tom came to my wedding and told me that I had made the biggest mistake of my life.”

He said that? “Oh, yes, he did. On my wedding day. He said, ‘It’s a joke, and you’re making a mistake’.”

Had Black asked his opinion? “No. But he was my best friend and if anybody could say it to me, he could. I took no offence. In the long term he was actually right. I moved down to London with my new husband and had our oldest daughter, Beth. Tom never interfered in the marriage or anything like that, but he had decided that there was nobody else he was going to marry, and that he would wait… So when my marriage broke down, he stepped in and said, ‘You know we’re meant to be together, so can you just get on with it, move back up here and let’s get married’. And that’s what we did, 25 years ago on Monday.”

Black has three adult daughters, two of them – Grace and Anna – from her second marriage, and has no difficulty in telling them that she loves them. It is for them that she has written All That Remains; so that they hear her stories, in her words, when she is gone.

She has given some thought to her own end. “I’m really curious about death. I want to know what it feels like. We’ve built up this idea that death is something dreadful which we should fear, but it might be the best experience of your entire life. Does it have a smell? A sound? Is it like going under a general anaesthetic? I can never know until that moment and there’s a part of me feels that will be stolen from me if I can’t control and experience it.”

Control it? “Well, I can if I have the ability to take the pill that ends my life.” Black is in favour of the legalisation of assisted suicide and believes the law will change in her lifetime – “In humanitarian terms, it has to”; she would like to have the option to choose her own time of death.

“But I would also like to be able to control my dying. If it has to be in a hospital bed, don’t anaesthetise me. Don’t get me to the point where I am floating in oblivion. If it’s pain, let me have the pain. Like a lot of women, and a lot of redheads, I have a really high pain threshold, and it doesn’t scare me at all. To deaden pain deadens life as well and I want to be there at the final moment, as conscious as I possibly can be.”

She wants to be alone. She doesn’t want her children to witness her dying. And yet not quite alone. Death, as Black sees it, is female; an interesting colleague all these years, and – she hopes – a helpful friend in the final moments. So she expects dying to feel like an encounter with some presence?

“It might do, and if it does then I’m ready for that. That’s my grandmother’s teachings. It’s what she buried inside my brain – that there may well be something there to talk with, something to be there with you on that threshold.”

Black smiles, a scientist whose career has been built on verifiable facts taking pleasure in uncertainty: “I don’t know”.

All That Remains: A Life in Death, by Professor Dame Sue Black, published by Doubleday, £16.99