This is The Guardian.

Before we begin, this article contains some strong language.

Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.

For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to the Guardian.com forward slash long read.

The Human Stain Remover.

What Britain's greatest extreme cleaner learned from 25 years on the job by Tom Lamont, read by Ellis James.

When the entrance to a theatre in London's West End was discovered to be smeared with

blood and feces one day in March, a distress call went out to the

headquarters of Ben Giles, a 49-year-old veteran of the Extreme Clean, who is based in Cardigan

in Wales. Decades earlier, as a young no-nothing hired by police to clean vehicles, Giles laboured

for hours to remove fingerprint dust from the interior

of a stolen car. Work that now, with the experience of innumerable litter-dashed, liquid sodden,

gunge-roped scenes, would take him about 30 minutes. Job by job, he figured out when to scrape

or sand, soak or fog, preserve or dispose.

Boilers suited and plastic booted.

Giles learnt how to eliminate most evidence of spillages, collisions, protests, hemorrhages, severings, explosions, fires and floods,

becoming a self-taught stained savant, a walking database of remedies.

When you've lifted a layered lasagna of toilet paper and semen from the floor of a submarine yard in Barrow and Furnace,

there's not much left in the world that can scare you.

What exactly was the problem in the West End?

Details were explained to one of Giles' operators at the Cardigan H.Q.

About four o'clock that afternoon in March,

...