‘Steal her face? How can they do that?’
‘They can do that these days. It’s that Dr Kaye – he can do anything. Really anything.’
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
‘I’m not saying it’s true,’ begged Bernadette, trying very hard not to cry. ‘I’m just saying that’s what she thinks. Now a girl that thinks that, she shouldn’t be going into surgery, should she? Don’t you think, Inspector? Don’t you?’
Bernadette ground to a halt, unable to speak.
‘I’ll look into it. We’ll be in touch, Mrs McNalty.’
Bernadette put down the phone, put her head in her hands and cried. She had done what she could. Now it was in other hands than her own.
Inspector Alderson was at a bit of a loss as to how to proceed. His personal opinion was that it was all going to turn out to be a load of baloney, but if, on the other hand, there was anything in it at all, it would hit the press sooner rather than later and the police couldn’t afford to be seen to be doing nothing. He put in a call to Home Manor Farm, where he got confirmation that yes, actually, an operation was taking place at that moment – very small, nothing much, a girl having some minor burn scars seen to and a few other bits and pieces. A little breast enhancement. The speaker wasn’t sure what, exactly.
The girl’s name was Sara Carter and she was seventeen years old. That made the inspector sit up a little. Seventeen was very young for such operations – and at Heat’s house, and, yes, Dr Kaye was performing the op.
So much madness around one so young, thought the policeman. He put a couple of people on the case, to get in touch with the girl’s mother and father, who surely ought to know what was going on, and to ring the boy Bernadette had mentioned, and to get the local force on the case. They could go round and check out the consent forms. It was worth having a look at this one, just out of curiosity if nothing else.
At last, at long last, a network was rising up to help Sara. But so, so late! Even now, Dr Kaye was peeling away the flesh, while his assistant prepared Heat to receive her beauty. Despite her madness, it was all exactly as Sara feared.
Mark had been taken at about half past ten. It was about 11.15 when he received a call from the police. Fortunately, he’d had the sense to put his phone on vibrate. In a quiet voice, he confirmed what Bernadette had said – yes, the operation had been brought forward at short notice; yes, Sara had been planning on leaving; yes, she was frightened that they were going to steal her face. No, there was no evidence. But she was seeing ghosts in there! No one in their right mind would put such a vulnerable girl through any sort of cosmetic procedures, surely?
The van passed out of signal, but Mark had said his piece. Something was happening, at least, but as far as he could tell, it was already too late. He assumed that the minor procedures they planned would be almost finished by now. He did not know that they were actually removing her face even as he spoke.
It was roughly half past twelve by the time the van pulled off the motorway and into traffic. From what Mark could gather, it was a town – there were plenty of stops and starts and quite a bit of traffic, considering the hour. He suspected they were in London. They must be nearing their destination. The van moved on, slowly now, and over a bumpy road – obviously not London after all.
The van pulled up; the men got out. The door opened. Mark was gestured to come out. He had no particular plan and no idea what they were going to do with him – desert him, question him, beat him or kill him. His fear that he would make things worse for himself, his natural good manners and sheer unfamiliarity with threat and violence all made it difficult for him to act, but he managed it. It was pathetic really – he was aware of it at the time. He was small, out of condition and untrained; the two men were big, fit and trained. Nevertheless, as he stood in front of one and with his back to the other, Mark thought that he had to try. He’d already been frozen once when Sara walked away into the operating theatre. He didn’t want that to happen again.
So he kicked the one in front of him in the balls.
To his amazement, it worked. The man doubled up with a breathy groan. Mark stood staring down at him writhing at his feet in amazement; then the man behind him grabbed his neck. Mark jerked his head back, more to try to see what was going on than anything else, and by sheer good luck caught the man in the nose with the back of his head. The man yelped and let him go. Mark ran for it, the man with the bloody nose on his heels. He could actually hear him snarling through bubbles of blood.
He was as good as dead now, even if he hadn’t been before.
He knew at once he had no chance of escaping from his pursuer, who was bigger, stronger, fitter and faster. After ten steps the feet were right on his heels; he could almost feel the hands reaching out for him. So he stopped running and curled up in a ball on the ground. The man tripped over him. Mark got up and ran away again in the opposite direction. Behind him, the man got up after him and the chase began again.
No one had made a sound – maybe there were people nearby, but that didn’t occur to Mark until later; all he wanted to do was hide where he couldn’t be found. After another twenty steps he was completely out of breath and the man was again almost on his back. Mark had exhausted his repertoire of fight tricks, so he did the same thing again – curled up in a ball. To his amazement it worked; again the man tripped over him, again Mark got up and ran away. The man got up and followed him, all in quietness. It was like a slapstick sequence out of the old silent movies. To one side, Mark could see the other man beginning to straighten up and hobble towards him and he knew he had to get away properly or they would get him between them. He still couldn’t think of any new tricks, however, so he did the old one again: curling up in a ball. It worked – the man must have thought no one could possibly be so stupid as to try that again. Down he went with a cry this time. Mark was so out of breath he could hardly move, but he got up and hobbled onwards, doubled up with a stitch, gasping for breath and with a red mist of exhaustion before his eyes. This time, there were no feet after him. He risked a glimpse back. His pursuer was on his feet but hobbling badly. Mark’s luck had held – the man had obviously hurt his foot in that final fall. He was almost incoherent with rage and started shouting and bawling at Mark to come back. The man with the kicked crotch was also on the move, so Mark gathered up the last of his strength, and ran off into the darkness.
After a short dash he came to a heap of rubbish – it was dark and he couldn’t see well, but it looked like bin bags and bits of wood and other stuff. In fact, he had been taken to a municipal tip. Behind, his pursuers were on the move. The rubbish heap was steep and Mark had no energy left to climb it, so instead, he did the only thing he could do – he dug a hole in it about a metre up, climbed inside and covered himself over with rubbish.
Seconds later, they arrived on the spot. They took a few faltering steps up the rubbish heap and paused. One of them was actually standing on his head.
‘Where the fuck’s he gone?’
‘Up there somewhere, he must be.’
‘How’s he got up there? This stuff’s all over the place, we’d hear him.’
It was true; the rubbish was unstable. If he was up there, they’d hear him. The other man took a couple of steps up and stood on Mark’s feet. He felt like a dead man with the angels top and bottom.
The two men began to argue about what to do. One of them went back to get a torch while the other scouted around the tarmac area around the tip. But the game was already over, and Mark knew it. They’d left the spot where he lay; they’d not find him again. All he had to do was to stay still, keep mum and hope they didn’t come back that way.
After what seemed like hours, the men left. Mark waited for ages – hours perhaps – before he came out; they could be waiting for him, how could he tell? He emerged into pitch darkness. He phoned the police and left his number with the operator. Then he buried himself again in the rubbish and more or less passed out.
Meanwhile, the pol
ice investigation was gathering momentum. They had discovered that Jessica did not know that the operation was taking place that night. They had also been examining their records and discovered that Heat had answered questions before about a young girl in trouble. It wasn’t much, but it tied in. She had disappeared two years previously and had never been seen since. Her last known job and place of residence were Home Manor Farm, where she had been employed as a housemaid. Her name was Catherine Monroe. Finally, the man who had gone out to the house to examine the consent papers was being stalled. The papers had been misplaced, apparently. All in all, it was beginning to look to Inspector Alderson as if something fishy was going on.
At midnight, another, less official front swung into operation, this time put into motion by Sara herself. As the pips sounded, Janet fulfilled her promise to her friend. She had no idea that Sara had gone into the operation after all – she had not picked up her own mobile all evening out of a nervous dread of being traced somehow to these calls she was about to make. But she was determined to do her bit. Nervously, she dialled a number and spoke to a local news desk. After the first one, she moved on to a couple of other locals, then to a well-known daily. It was getting easier. Soon she was on to a staff reporter on Heat magazine, then on to OK, NOW, the Daily Mirror, the Sun and so on. Sara had been as good as her word – the password, ‘Sara’s Face’, made them all jump to attention – Janet could hear it in their voices. Rapidly, a small army of overexcited reporters, cameramen and news crews jumped into their cars and vans and sped off through the night to Home Manor Farm. They didn’t know quite what was going on, but Jonathon Heat had been teetering on the edge of total disaster for years now. Sara had promised them the news story of their lives. They were prepared to risk life, limb and integrity to get it.
Before long, the front gate was a blaze of TV lights. Images of Home Manor Farm, where a young fan was rumoured to be being subjected to facial surgery she had not consented to – surgery performed by Heat’s notorious surgeon, Dr Wayland Kaye – were being broadcast in every country in the world. There were even rumours that Heat was in the process of stealing her face.
Of course, at this point, no one really believed it, but that was irrelevant. News isn’t about what’s true, but about whether journalists can find someone who thinks it might be; an accusation is true enough. In this case, Sara’s mother, Jessica, didn’t know the operation was taking place at that time, Bernadette had been promised it wasn’t happening at that time and Sara’s friend Janet, who of course the press were in touch with within the hour, claimed that Sara had actually been planning on running away before they ever touched her. It was enough. Anyway, even if it wasn’t true, it ought to be as far as the magazines were concerned. They had been after Kaye for years. The mere fact that he was operating on a seventeen-year-old girl was enough to make the headlines.
The combination of press and police acted like an explosive. The investigation was turned up. The consent papers, when the police finally got their hands on them after much delay and obfuscation by the Heat household, had the wrong date and the exact nature of the operation Sara was undergoing was unclear to say the least. By this time, the investigation was out of the hands of Inspector Alderson; the Chief Constable of Cheshire was on the case. At 1 a.m. the police requested permission to enter the operating theatre to check that everything was as Heat’s household claimed it was. Permission was refused. They were now told that there were complications. Sara had reacted badly to the anaesthetic and Dr Kaye was fighting for her life. At 3 a.m. the operation was still under way and the extraordinary decision was made to seek an injunction to enter the operating theatre and make sure nothing untoward was going on.
Things were now moving very fast indeed. In the heat of the investigation and the hysteria of the press interest, it came out that Heat had asked Sara to fill in a form that allowed her organs to be used for transplant if anything should happen to her. Her heart, her liver – why not her face? Still no one believed it, but no satisfactory reasons were being given to keep independent doctors and surgeons out of the operating theatre and at 7 a.m., a policeman, in company with no less than four eminent doctors, knocked at the front door armed with the injunction to enter the theatre and even to stop the operation if necessary. Sara and her face had been put into the care of the courts. She had now been in surgery for over eight hours.
The policeman knocked; the flashlights popped. The door opened. The household had been warned, but seemed to be doing their best to slow the whole thing down as much as possible. The policeman was asked to wait. He shook his head. An argument ensued. The policeman stood to one side, waved his hand behind him and ten heavy officers pushed their way into the house.
Down in the basement, where Heat had built the private operating theatre, the latest operation was going according to plan. It seems likely that Kaye and Woods felt that the further the operation went, the harder it would be to stop it. Only half an hour before, Sara’s face had been plucked up from the front of her head and laid neatly on the bloodied front of Heat’s. There had as yet been no time to connect any nerves, but to move things further on, Kaye had stitched it on at the tip of his nose. Sara, meanwhile, lay unconscious, paralysed, faceless and expressionless under a sheet, a layer of sterilised tissue over her face to keep the wounds fresh. The remains of Heat’s face had already been removed and incinerated.
The police entered as the surgeon was putting in the last stitches on the nose. There was no shouting in theatre with such delicate work going on, but Tom Woods was hissing in the senior officer’s ear, demanding that he leave. Kaye himself seemed relieved. He flung down his knife and walked out, pulling off his rubber gloves without saying a word. His juniors began the work of stabilising the faces of the two patients; there would be a wait before Sara could be taken away. Already, counter-claims against the injunction were under way; it could still be reversed.
And reversed it was within the hour, with the surgeons still preparing the two patients to wait for further surgery. An hour after that, the injunction was again put in place and three hours after the police had entered the house, Sara and Heat were removed from the house into a crowd of yelling, shoving journalists. Both were unconscious, and both would remember it in years to come not from their own senses but from the endless photographs and video footage of the scene – the police crowding round, the emergency vehicles waiting on the gravel, the flashing lights, the two trolleys with the patients – victims? – clients? – being wheeled into separate ambulances. There was a frightful moment when one of the dogs, badly trained, or perhaps spooked by the crowd, or tempted by the smell of blood, leaned to one side and snatched at the sheet covering one of the bodies. The cameras snapped and rolled, and revealed to the world the now famous image of Sara’s face, inert in a way no face ever should be. But it wasn’t Sara who was wearing it – it was Heat himself.
The question now was – who owned Sara’s face?
Epilogue: Lucy Smith
It’s a lovely drive through the Berkshire countryside, all rolling pastures and hedgerows. It’s where I grew up. For such a heavily populated county, there’s a lot of woodland. I live in the north now, where people tend to think of the southern fields and woods as being too neat, too ordered. They love the moors and the rocky places, the crags and the big skies. I love them, too, but it’s the green valleys and beech woods that touch me inside as only a homecoming can.
Berkshire has its rough side, same as everywhere else, but it also has far more than its fair share of rich people and places. Actors, rock stars and other celebrities buy hidden farmhouses next to wealthy aristocrats. The land is fertile, the place has been rich for centuries. There’s the river Thames flowing fatly along past green pastures, boating houses, long gardens with a jetty on the end and pretty villages and towns. It’s Three Men in a Boat country. On the downs, they breed racehorses.
Berkshire attracts more than its fair share of horsey people, too. There are riding stable
s, stud farms, racecourses. It was to visit the owner of one of those stud farms that I was going today. Her name is Lucy Smith.
You won’t have heard of her – not yet anyway.
Some explanation is called for here.
The events I’m about to describe took place in April 2006, more than a month after I’d finished this book. That is to say, after I thought I’d finished this book. I’d been invited by the company who had commissioned me to write the story to come to the stud farm and talk to Lucy, who, I was told, had some information that would cast a new light on the story so far.
I was intrigued. I was also annoyed – I’d already finished the wretched thing, I was on to something new. I don’t like going over old ground and I was unsure about how much more work was going to be involved. What if I had to rewrite the whole book?
But I was also intrigued. I knew as much as anyone else alive about Sara and her strange story, and yet here was someone I’d never even heard of who was apparently in possession of important information. What did she know? Who was Lucy Smith, and what was her relationship to Sara?
The fact was, it was an offer I just couldn’t refuse. As Lucy must surely have known.
I was a little early – she was still out on her ride, the stable manager told me – so I waited in the yard and watched the comings and goings. Busy places, stables. All very nice, very ordered out there in the pretty countryside – but there’s something rather urban about them. Perhaps it’s because horses used to be a means of transport and there would have been so many more in the towns once, same as cars today. And the clothes people wear – there’s something a little military about them. It’s not quite, but almost a uniform.
The horses were lovely – beautiful big beasties, some chestnut, some black, but most of them that less elegant spotted and splashed mixture of colours that horses often are – friendly-looking colours. The stable hands were brushing down a shaggy red mare, mucking out, wandering to and fro about God knows what jobs – horsey people always seem to be doing something. Someone led one clopping over the concrete and along a short track to a training ring. In a field beyond, there was a handful of mares and their foals, and next to them a couple of huge shire horses nibbling at a bundle of hay hanging from a tree, two metres off the ground. Lucy took an interest in several different breeds, it seemed.
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