The Faceless (19 page)

“I’d have said it was an asylum, but I had a sense of
physical
suffering too.”

“Abuse of some kind?”

“Abuse...” He stopped. Vera took his hand and squeezed. “Perhaps. But there was more. Worse. Wounds. I don’t know.”

“Was there anything else?”

“Yes. Just one other thing. The military. Something... something to do with the military. A uniform. Uniforms. I’m sorry. As I said, it was very intense, but not at all controlled, just a jumble.”

“You saying that all of this is random? No purpose to it?” Stakowski had been jotting notes on an A4 pad.

“Oh no. Not at all. There’s a very definite purpose of some kind. But... it’s like a huge train, hurtling past at top speed. The impressions I’ve had are like
–
glimpses through the windows.” Cowell groped for the cup of tea in front of him, spooned in half a dozen sugars, stirred.

Renwick let out a long sigh. “And that brings us to you, Ms Mason.”

Cowell looked sulky; pushed aside so soon. Vera looked at her sidelong, smiling slightly. Anna’s cheeks grew warm; she opened her shoulderbag and took three pictures from the file. “Here’s what I showed Sergeant Stakowski earlier.” She handed the first photograph to Crosbie, who studied it and passed it on.

“When Martyn described what he’d seen,” she began, “I knew it was something I’ve seen before. And I realised it was connected with a book I’ve been planning. Local history. History was always my thing. Took my degree in it.” McAdams stifled a yawn; her face burned. Enough. Block it out. “Anyway. My... er, area of interest ...” God, this wasn’t going well. “Local history and the First World War in particular.” Come on, Anna. Just tell them.

The picture showed rows of white mutilated faces like the ones from Shackleton Street. “This is the picture Martyn’s description reminded me of. They’re plaster casts of men suffering from facial wounds. Your face doesn’t really have any vital organs, so it can take some pretty horrific damage and survive. Fighting in a trench left your head very vulnerable to bullets, shrapnel or grenade splinters, but steel helmets prevented a lot of fatal injuries. So there were literally thousands of men like this in World War One. The French called them
gueules cassÉes
, the men with broken faces.”

“Jesus.” Renwick passed the picture on.

“The surgeons did their best – a lot of what we know now about reconstructive surgery came out of World War One – but there were limits to what they could do and how many they could help.”

She passed the second picture to Crosbie. It looked like part of a face had been cut off and laid out on a table. Just an eye, an eyebrow, a nose, part of the forehead. “What you’re looking at here is part of a facial prosthesis, made in France in 1918 by Anna Coleman Ladd. Made from paper-thin galvanised copper, then hand-painted to look absolutely lifelike. It took a month to produce each one. A British sculptor called Francis Derwent Wood did similar work with tin masks.” Anna felt Vera’s eyes on her; she looked down.
God. Get a grip. You’re not a teenager
. “They’d take a plaster cast, make clay or plasticine squeezes from it. Model the mask to match pre-injury photographs; hand-paint it to match the skin-tones. They looked real except at very close range. And of course, a mask can’t move.”

“Hand-painted? That’s what you said, right? They were hand-painted.”

“Martyn–”

“That’s what you said, right?”

“Yes.”

“They’d need painters to make the masks look right.”

“Martyn...”

“So the women from Eva’s class, that’s why they were taken. Eva could...”

“We don’t know that, lad,” Stakowski said gently.

“Four missing persons,” said Renwick. “Three deaths. More if there is indeed a connection with the fire at the college last month. And yes, some of the people presumed killed in the college fire may not have been. And then there’s what happened in the evidence room.”

“My department, I think.”

“Mr Cowell–”

“It’s supernatural. You’ve all seen that.”

“If we hadn’t, Mr Cowell, this discussion would
so
not be happening.”

“I’ve never heard of a spiritual being causing
direct
physical harm. The few that have malicious intentions generally seek to mislead people in harmful ways,because, physically, they can’t do anything. There’s possession, however...”

“Possession.”

“A spirit controlling a living person. Possessed people can display supernatural abilities. But this seems
entirely
supernatural.”

“So what do we do?”

“I don’t know, yet. But remember, I was told I
had
to come back here, which implies there’s something I can do.”

“Fine. So... World War One. What’s the connection?”

“The Kempforth Pals,” McAdams said, arms folded, looking down. Everyone looked at him; he’d been quiet throughout. “We learnt about it in school.”

Anna nodded. “So-called ‘Pals’ battalions were recruited from towns, districts – the local men could all join up and serve together, instead of being split up between different units. It helped recruiting. But when they went into action, it meant the entire adult male population of a town could be mown down within seconds. The Kempforth Pals went into action on 1
^st
July, 1916, at the Battle of the Somme. They were massacred. Only a handful survived.”

“All that was left in Kempforth were kids and old men.” McAdams looked up. “Same in towns like Accrington, Blackburn. It’s where all the jokes about us being inbred come from. Not many eligible men left after the war. Lot of folk ended up closely related. ’Cept the Asians, obviously, they came along later.”

“There’s something else,” said Anna. “It’s just a spit away from here, but hardly anyone in Kempforth even knows about it anymore. Not something they ever liked talking about.”

“Out of sight, out of mind,” said Stakowski. “Heard of it when I were a kid, but... big scandal at the time, then folk forgot it. They wanted to.”

Renwick coughed. “Could someone start making sense, please?”

Anna pushed more photographs across the table. “What do you see here?”

“Same as the others you showed me.”

“No. Anna Coleman Ladd’s studio was in Paris, Francis Derwent Wood’s in London.”

“So?”

“On the far side of a hill overlooking Kempforth, if you go into the woodland there, there’s a large area that’s fenced off. There are signs saying Keep Out, Danger. Officially it’s unsafe due to subsidence, caused by a demolition carried out years before. In fact, beyond that fencing is a large complex of abandoned buildings containing, among other things, the studio where those masks were made.”

“What?”

“The Kempforth Veterans’ Hospital and Sanitarium, Chief Inspector. Otherwise known as Ash Fell.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A
NNA LOOKED DOWN;
she could feel all their eyes on her. “Ash Fell was the brainchild of Sir Charles Dace,” she said. “He was the head of the Dace family when the Great War broke out.”

“The Dace family?” asked Renwick.

“They’d been the main landowners in Kempforth since the Norman Conquest,” said Anna. “Moved into textiles during the Industrial Revolution. In 1914, they owned both the cotton mills and most of the land. Sir Charles encouraged all his employees to join the Pals, not that they needed much encouragement.”

“Anything to get out of Kempforth,” chuckled Crosbie.

“No,” said Anna. “It wasn’t that. They thought they were needed. It was... a sense of duty. Hard to understand now, we’ve got so much more used to distrusting authority, I suppose. Sir Charles enlisted, too, but with a different regiment; he served in Flanders and saw conditions at the Front for himself. And then he learned what’d happened to the Kempforth Pals.”

She passed on a faded, sepia photograph of Sir Charles Dace: tall, lean, uniformed, swagger stick under one arm, chin up. Darkish hair; trimmed moustache, pale eyes.

“I’ve seen letters he wrote at the time. He believed in the Empire, but he was an enlightened imperialist. Believed there was a duty to the less fortunate – the ‘lower classes’ at home, the ‘lower races’ abroad. He felt responsible for the men of Kempforth. And most of them had now been wiped out. He couldn’t do much about that – apart from contribute to the war memorial, which he did – but there were a lot of physically and mentally damaged survivors. So he did something for them instead.”

“A hospital for war veterans,” said Renwick

“Hospital and
sanitarium
. A hospital treats and cures people. A sanitarium cares for people who can’t be cured. Kempforth Great House – the family seat – was on the hill overlooking the town. The opposite side, overlooking the moors, also belonged to the Daces too, including an uncultivated slope overgrown with rowan trees, otherwise known as mountain ash. Hence, Ash Fell.”

“I’ve been on the moors,” Renwick said. “I know the hillside you’re talking about. Never seen any sign of a building there.”

“It wasn’t meant to be visible. Sir Charles wanted to give the patients a sanctuary from the outside world.”

Renwick turned to Stakowski. “How come I never heard about Ash Fell, Mike? Especially last year when we were searching for a missing child.”

“I were under the impression the place had been demolished, ma’am.”

“Still an area where a body could have been dumped.”

“Only with great difficulty, boss. But I scouted round the general area – with DC Wayland, in fact – and couldn’t find owt. I was going to discuss getting authorisation to enter the grounds, but then... we found the Baldwin girl’s body.”

“Even so, I’ve been here nearly five years and never even heard of the place.”

“
I
hadn’t, till I were fourteen. And I grew up in Kempforth – me dad’s farm were on t’other side of the hill from Ash Fell. As kids we were told not to go into those woods. Not that you could go far
–
it were fenced off, wi’ danger signs all round it. Every bugger you asked had a different reason why. Hospital that burned down, madhouse where they all got left to starve, mad doctors doing human experiments... you heard ’em all. Never knew who to believe.”

“Tell kids not to go somewhere, it’s the first place they’ll head for.”

“Some did. I knew of two. It discouraged the rest of us.”

“They died?”

“One did. The other got some sort of brain damage. He lived another fifteen years, I heard. If you could call it living.”

“What actually happened?”

“Some kind of accident, in both cases. But no-one was ever quite sure what or how.”

Renwick looked at Anna. “Sorry, Ms Mason. Go on.”

“This is an aerial shot of Ash Fell. Unique as far as I know.”

Another photograph. Thick woods. A long drive led up to a large oblong structure. Two corridors extended out from either side at the front before travelling down the slope, each terminating in a square, red-brick building. At the back of the central building, a shorter, stubbier corridor jutted out on each side and a longer one to the rear; another square building stood at the end of each. It always made Anna think of a scorpion crouching, claws raised to attack.

Below the complex, on the picture’s bottom left, stood a cluster of smaller buildings by a stream; on the bottom right, a cruciform structure with stippled open space beside it. A round metal structure stood by the central building.

Cowell held up the picture. “This place–”

“Mr Cowell,” said Renwick.

“But I know this place–”

“Allen,” said Vera. “Let her carry on.” She caught Anna’s eye, smiled.

Anna smiled back, looked down, went on. “Ash Fell was built using a variant of the so-called radial plan. Different wings and wards radiate from a central admin block.”

“So what’s what?” Renwick asked.

“I’ll start with the outlying buildings. On the left is the Home Farm. Asylums and big hospitals generally tried to be self-sufficient back then. It had livestock, plus a greenhouse, bakery, dairy. Wheat and cornfields. Even a water-mill to grind flour.” She tapped the cruciform building. “Here’s the chapel and cemetery.”

“Cemetery?”

“If you died at Ash Fell, you were generally buried there.”

Renwick tapped the central building. “Admin block?”

“Yes. The Warbeck building. The metal structure beside it is the water tower.” Anna produced another picture. “Here’s a frontal view.”

Warbeck was three storeys high, four if you counted the attic space. Red brick. Wide concrete steps led up to a portico. Big, black, heavy doors. A clock tower loomed above them.

“Warbeck was the centre of operations for Ash Fell. Operating theatres, kitchens, laundry, gymnasium, swimming pool, mortuary. The superintendent’s quarters were incorporated into it too. Normally that would been a separate building, but Ash Fell wasn’t normal.”

“You’re not bloody kidding,” said Stakowski.

“What about these other five?” asked Renwick.

“The two lower wings are D and E Blocks. The three above are A, B and C. Each handled different categories of patient.”

“Go on.”

“A, B and C blocks all provided hospital care. C Block dealt with facial injuries.”

“
Gueules cassÉes
,” said Vera. Those yellow eyes met Anna’s. Catlike. And what was she? A mouse? Was Vera assessing prey or a potential mate? “Right?”

“Right.” Anna coughed. “Block B was for miscellaneous patients: cases of gas poisoning, a few amputees. Block A was psychiatric. As you can see, there was open space around each one for exercise and fresh air; between each block, and between D and E Blocks and the main path, they’d conserved patches of woodland. It meant each block was like a self-contained community.”

“And D and E Block were for sanitarium care?” asked Renwick.

“Yes. Patients who were too badly damaged to ever function in the outside world again. Block D housed patients too badly disfigured for reconstructive surgery. Many of their loved ones couldn’t bear to see them. E Block was psychiatric. There were catatonic cases. Others wandered around in a world of their own, reliving the past over and over – mostly harmless, except when they struck themselves around the head to try and drive the memories out. Sometimes smashing their heads against walls. They couldn’t get past what’d happened to them. There were also some violent cases – they’d think they were back in combat, or overreact massively to every irritation. Your little boy won’t eat his greens so instead of telling him off you smash his face into the table-top three times. And there were so many cases. There were over 20,000 men drawing pensions for shell-shock the year Ash Fell opened.”