"IT'S actually not that bad," I hear as I step into a room doused in crimson. "Only about a pint of blood, max."

Okay, so that is my first question answered before I have even opened my mouth. Caroline is immune to the sight of other people's bodily fluids (just as well since there seems to be loads of it from where I'm standing).

More swab team than SWAT team, Caroline Taylor is a senior officer in a team of crime scene investigators.

Based in Runcorn but covering Warrington and Widnes, Caroline and her five colleagues are highly trained forensics experts called out to anything from simple car break-ins to full-scale murder inquiries.

Today I am standing in the lounge of a bed-sit where hours earlier a drunken fight had broken out and a man was stabbed.

To my untrained eye it looks like the occupant has just had a particularly heavy nosebleed.

But despite her heavy workload, the chirpy 33-year-old from the Wirral with 11 years experience, meticulously goes about establishing whose blood is whose and how it got there. There is urgency but this kind of thing cannot be rushed.

It is fascinating work and I almost forget that I am ridiculously dressed in a white all-in-one forensic suit and resemble a scientist out of ET or a member of the Beastie Boys.

The suits serve two purposes: to protect the evidence from us (our regular clothes and footwear could contaminate the scene) and to protect us from the evidence (CSIs get marginally fewer splash-backs than your average painter and decorator).

Caroline takes dozens of photographs of the scene - each room contains varying amounts of blood - and then swabs a sample of patches, which are labelled and sent away for DNA testing.

It is undeniably a violent scene but with the victim in hospital, a PC guarding the door and detectives quizzing neighbours across the hall, we are left in peace.

I ask Caroline if she ever gets any trouble while she is trying to work.

"Only twice," she says. "Once I was dusting a car down for prints and the local yobs decided to come to jump up and down on the bonnet.

"I radioed for back-up and they cleared off. The other time it was a domestic dispute where one of the people had a go because they thought I was taking sides when really I was just getting on with my job."

Also that morning we attend a burglary.

The intruders struck in the middle of the night and befriended the family Staffordshire bull terrier on the way to helping themselves to the family jewellery and anything else they can get their hands on.

It is a less gruesome scene (Caroline is dusting things down for fingerprints rather than swabbing blood splodges) but the impact of crime on people's lives seems greater.

"I'm gutted," the mother says while her husband and sons try to take in the scale of what has been stolen.

Caroline takes 'elims' (fingerprints to eliminate the family) and we leave, not in a shiny black soft top like Grissom or Haratio might do in the American cop show, but in a dark blue unmarked van.

Designer suits and aviator shades sadly do not come with either job so we squint into the sun as we pull away.

"Do you ever watch the CSI series on TV?" I ask.

"Sometimes," she replies "But it's like a busman's holiday for me if I do, and it annoys me when you see a detective stomping all over a crime scene in their fancy suit while people like me sweat it out in boiler suits - it just doesn't happen."

I ask her what made her want to become a crime scene investigator, with the long hours, the often squalid conditions and the daily depressing realisation of the bad things people do to each other.

"In this job you never know what's going to happen next," she tells me. "Besides, when I was a little girl I always wanted to be the next Sherlock Holmes."