The Faceless

by Simon Bestwick

  “St. John was the eldest and the favoured son. Promising athlete, reasonable academic qualifications, groomed to take over the business. Gideon, in contrast, was a sickly child, with a permanent limp from an accident when he was seven. Sir Charles never hid his disappointment in Gideon. He was very intelligent, though. First class degree from Cambridge, despite blowing most of his allowance on drink, gambling and prostitutes.”

  “What they’d call ‘acting out’ these days,” said Renwick.

  “Or being an arsehole,” said Stakowski. “Take your pick.”

  “Gideon seems to have alternately craved his father’s respect and hated his guts. Which might explain future events. When Sir Charles died in September 1929, Gideon was in Paris, celebrating his graduation; St. John had been managing the business day-to-day for several years. What they didn’t know until the will was read out was that Sir Charles had spent virtually the entire Dace family fortune. First on building Ash Fell, then on establishing the Ash Fell Hospital Trust Fund to keep it running for years to come. He’d made over nearly everything that hadn’t been spent on the hospital to the fund. As a result the business was almost bankrupt, plus the brothers had inherited Sir Charles’ debts, which were substantial. St. John had some stocks and shares; he planned to liquidate them and plough them into the business, but–”

  “The Wall Street Crash,” said Stakowski.

  Anna nodded. “St. John’s assets were wiped out; Gideon didn’t have any of his own. They had to sell the business to a competitor for a pittance to prevent it going bust. They also had to sell most of their land. Once Sir Charles’ debts were paid off, they still had Kempforth Great House, but that was pretty much it. And this was where Gideon came into his own. Whatever he lacked in physical strength, he made up for in cunning.”

  Renwick sipped her coffee.

  “The fund was managed by a Board of Trustees, so the first step was getting onto it. The biggest opponent of that was the Chairman, Dr John Lethbridge. In late 1931, someone gave the police compromising photographs of Lethbridge with a young man. Anonymously, of course. Lethbridge was forced to resign and died in prison. In early 1932, St. John Dace was unanimously voted in as the new Chairman. Between 1932 and 1935, the remaining original Trustees resigned one by one.”

  “Blackmail?” asked Renwick.

  “Impossible to prove, but most likely. New Trustees were appointed – friends of Gideon. Most of them had no medical background; none of them ever even saw the hospital. They just acted as a rubber stamp.”

  “They embezzled the Hospital?” Renwick asked.

  “Slowly, over a number of years. They had to launder the money they were bleeding off. But the Great Depression was still going on, so under the guise of economic necessity, wages and equipment at Ash Fell were cut drastically from 1936 onwards. They stopped taking new hospital patients and trained, experienced staff were replaced with the cheapest possible labour.”

  “Gideon’s work?”

  “He was pulling all the strings, but someone else was always officially in charge. The tours were almost certainly his idea, but when they started St. John was conducting them.”

  “Tours?”

  “Little brainwave Gideon had for some additional income. In the old days, people used to visit lunatic asylums for amusement. Come and look at the freakshow. Laugh at the funny mad people.” She heard her voice grow raw. Calm, Anna. “Gideon revived the practice.

  “The only patients at Ash Fell now were sanitarium cases. Gideon actively sought out new ones to fill A, B and C blocks. Ash Fell was designed to hold four hundred patients. By early 1937 the numbers were almost double that, all either seriously disturbed, appallingly disfigured or both.

  “Gideon knew people who’d pay to look at the insane and the disfigured. Or worse. He found them; St. John guided them round the hospital. Groups of patients were penned up in communal areas, half-naked, left to soil themselves. Made a better spectacle. Gideon, as always, stayed well back from it.”

  “Plausible deniability,” said Vera. Her fingers toyed with a cigarette pack. They were long. Clever-looking; nimble.

  Anna nodded. “It made money, but it took its toll on St. John. He began drinking heavily, gained about five stone in weight. When the war broke out, he made a concerted effort to get into shape and enlisted. Anything to get away from Kempforth and Gideon, I think. He was posted to the Far East; tried again and again to get combat assignments. His superiors thought he had a death wish – go out in a blaze of glory, redeem the family honour. When that failed and he ended up in a succession of staff postings, he started drinking again. Caught malaria. He was demobilised in early ’46 and went back to Kempforth. Nowhere else to go. While he was gone, Gideon had had himself voted onto the Board and things at Ash Fell got even worse.”

  “Worse? How?” asked Stakowski.

  “Allegedly? Bringing in prostitutes to publicly copulate with the mutilated prisoners. Forcing the psychiatric patients to fight each other, sometimes to the death.”

  “They got away with that?”

  “Who was going to report it? The staff weren’t, and nor were Gideon’s guests. The hospital doctors signed the death certificates and they were buried in the grounds.”

  “And what did St. John think of all this?” asked Renwick.

  “God knows. He was pretty much a complete wreck by then. As far as anyone can tell, he spent the next year carrying on as before. No-one’s sure if Gideon’s wartime ‘entertainments’ carried on. But Gideon was losing interest anyway. Ypres and the Somme were old hat now; they had Auschwitz, the Burma Railway, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Besides, the Trust Fund was nearly exhausted. All he wanted now was to get the actual land back. Some of the psychiatric patients were transferred elsewhere in late ’46 and early ’47. What he had planned for the surviving facial injury patients no-one’s really sure. And then...

  “May 1947. St. John led another guided tour round Ash Fell, finished up in E Block. No-one’s quite sure exactly what happened. Somehow, the inmates got out of their cells. One woman managed to get out through a window. Got out of the grounds completely, in fact. She made it to a nearby farmhouse and raised the alarm.

  “When the police and ambulance arrived, St. John and his guests were all dead. They’d been torn to pieces. St John Dace was probably dead before the patients got him. He’d shot himself with a pistol.”

  “Could he have let them out?” asked Vera. The tip of her pink tongue briefly touched her red top lip.

  “That’s one theory. Another is a member of staff whose conscience finally got the better of him, or a patient’s relative taking revenge. Either way, it finally finished Ash Fell.”

  “And Gideon?” Cowell pressed the cold flannel to his jaw again.

  “Oh, he escaped prison; legally he had next to no connection with the place, even though it was common knowledge he was behind it all. And of course he could afford some very good legal counsel. Some of the hospital staff were jailed, but most of the blame was put on St. John, who was conveniently dead.”

  “You’re not saying the bastard got away with it?” said Stakowski.

  “Oh no. He didn’t. Gideon won the criminal case, but a dozen patients’ families sued not only the Hospital Trust – which by now had no money – but Gideon personally. He was still on the Board; he had that one connection with Ash Fell, but it was enough. They won, and the trial judge awarded huge damages. Gideon tried to appeal it, but failed. Once the damages and legal fees were paid, he was ruined. All he had left was Kempforth Great House. And Ash Fell itself.”

  “Ash Fell?” asked Renwick.

  “He’d been fighting a separate case to get the land restored to the Dace family when the Trust was dissolved – planned to sell it and the Great House, leave Kempforth, start over. But no-one wanted to buy it, especially not from him. In 1953, Kempforth Great House burned to the ground. And it wasn’t insured.”

  “No way,” said Vera. Her smile was cold, flinty. Anna couldn
’t look away from those yellow cat’s eyes. “He ended up in the hospital?”

  “That’s right. The one thing he still owned. This huge complex of buildings, and he had them all to himself. From then until the day he died.”

  “Christ,” said McAdams. “Drive you mad, that would.”

  “It did. Apparently he acted constantly as if he was being followed around – shouted at people who weren’t there. Not that people saw much of him after 1953. No-one’s sure how he survived as long as he did, but he managed somehow.”

  “How long did he live there?” asked Renwick.

  “Around Christmas of 1985, one of the hill farmers – one of the few people who’d have anything to do with him – realised he hadn’t seen Gideon for a while. So he went to the hospital. He found Gideon in the Warbeck building, lying at the foot of the stairs. He’d been dead for over a month. The post-mortem showed he’d broken his spine. He hadn’t died quickly. He was seventy-seven years old.”

  “Nasty way to go,” said Stakowski. “But if anyone deserved it...”

  “After that, the council sold Ash Fell to a property developer who wanted to turn it into luxury apartments–”

  “Christ on a bike.”

  “–but the company went bust in the 1987 crash.”

  “Serves the buggers right.”

  “Mike.”

  “Sorry ma’am.”

  “After that it became council property again. They planned to demolish Ash Fell completely, but there were a string of accidents on site. Three workmen died, nearly a score were injured, equipment and materials either stopped working or went missing. Rumours started going around that the job was jinxed, Ash Fell was haunted. Nobody wanted to work on the site. The demolition costs were overrunning, and it wasn’t as if the council had any particular plans for the land. It was just that most people in the area wanted to forget the place ever existed. In the end, they announced it’d been demolished and fenced the whole area off.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I only found it was still there through a colleague at the council. I was trying to get hold of some pictures from the demolition for the book I was planning. That’s when she told me that it was still standing but any access to the site was a complete no-no.” Anna shook her head. “Chances of getting a book about the place published are pretty low. But I couldn’t drop the project – it was fascinating, in a horrible way.”

  “Just outside the town,” said Stakowski. “With plenty of room for people to stay, if you’re not too choosy. Whether they want to or not. And practically nobody knows it’s there.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “MR COWELL, I am not taking civilians into a situation like this.”

  “Chief Inspector, you’re going to need my help. You’ve seen for yourself you’re not dealing with a run-of-the-mill kidnapper. Something supernatural – or paranormal, if you don’t like that word – is involved. You may’ve only glimpsed it, but you can’t deny what you saw. None of you can.”

  “We don’t know who or what’s up there, Mr Cowell.”

  Sweat gleamed on Cowell’s forehead. “All the more reason to bring someone who does.”

  “And you do?”

  His voice rose. “I’d say I’m the closest thing to an expert you have.” Vera put a hand on his arm. Cowell shook her off. “This isn’t a straightforward haunting. This is physically dangerous to the living, and you’ll need more than a truncheon and a can of pepper spray to stop it.”

  “Mr Cowell–”

  “Allen,” said Vera. “Chief Inspector, you have to admit he has a point.”

  “Boss?” said Stakowski. Renwick turned; his gaze was steady. “Talk to you for a second?”

  After a moment, she nodded. “Dave, Alastair, can you keep an eye on things here?”

  “Nae hassle,” said Crosbie.

  “Don’t worry,” Vera said, “we won’t break anything.”

  Martyn chuckled at that. But Vera was looking at Anna when she said it, smiling; after a second, Anna smiled back.

  “OK, MIKE. WHAT you thinking?”

  Stakowski breathed out, looked back up at her. “We should take Cowell along.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Look, I know he’s at least eighty per cent horseshit, but–”

  “Only eighty?”

  A weak smile. “I’d’ve said a hundred before today. But you saw what happened in the evidence room.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “Hate to say it, but Cowell’s right. He’s the closest thing we’ve got to an expert.”

  “Come on. What about one of the local priests or vicars?”

  “You’d have to convince them first, and word would get out. I assume you’d not planned on telling the Bedstead about this part of it?”

  “Funnily enough, I think it’s going to completely slip my mind.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “I have my moments. But if Banstead knew I was taking Cowell seriously...”

  “Does he need to know yet?”

  “No.”

  “If you get a result he’ll not give a shit how you got it. Be too busy telling every bugger he believed in you all along.”

  “So you think I should bring Cowell?”

  “And Ms Mason.”

  “Mike–”

  “I’d be surprised if you’ll find anyone who knows more about that place. You could try the council, but knowing them it’ll probably take a fortnight before they even admit it’s still standing.”

  “Fair point. But I don’t like bringing civvies into this. There’s any number of ways it could go tits-up.”

  “This isn’t a normal case, ma’am.”

  “I had noticed. My priority’s getting Roseanne Trevor out of there.”

  “If she’s alive.”

  “If she’s alive.”

  “And Tahira Khalid.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Danielle Morton, and–”

  “Yeah, OK Mike, thanks.”

  “We might also consider bringing Cowell’s sister along.”

  “Why not just print invitations?”

  “She knows how to handle Cowell. God knows we don’t need him getting any flakier than he already is.”

  “I must be going as mental as you. It’s making sense.” To hell with everything else; everything but getting the child out alive. “You’re going to suggest we bring Griffiths as well.”

  “A: could come in handy if we find any of the women from the college. B: he’ll want to come. And C: frankly, better he’s up there with us than shooting his mouth off down here.”

  Renwick released a long breath. “Alright. We’ll do it. But they keep to the rear, and out of our way.”

  “THE ORIGINAL PLANS for the building are lost – no-one’s exactly sure when. But these are the individual floor plans.” Anna handed more papers to Renwick. “One set for Warbeck, another for each individual block.”

  “Thanks. OK... DC Crosbie will run you back home. If you can make your way to the Station Hotel for 7.30 am tomorrow, that will be appreciated. And Mr Cowell, Miss Latimer, if you can be ready to go by then.”

  “I will be,” said Cowell. “Believe me, I will. Don’t worry, Chief Inspector. I won’t let you down.”

  “OK. Everyone else? Good.”

  “Come on, Allen,” Vera said.

  “Alastair, if you can run them back? Thanks.”

  Alone with Stakowski, Renwick went to the kettle. “Tea, two sugars?”

  “You’re brewing up?” His smile was shaky. “I might faint. Aye, go on.”

  Renwick filled the kettle.

  “So what’s the plan, boss?”

  “Leave as little to chance as we can. Go over the floor plans, work out our approach. And we draw firearms... whatever Cowell says, those things are solid enough to snatch people.”

  “With you on that. If you want me, I mean.”

  Renwick got the milk from the fridge. “What did you find out
about Cowell?”

  “All about contacts, police work. You know that. So I rang a mate of mine.”

  “You have friends?”

  “Ha-ha. Ben Hardman – he’s retired now, but he were a beat copper round Dunwich and the Polar back in the ’80s.”

  “And?”

  “Cowell’s a stage name. He were born Alan Latimer.”

  “Latimer, like his sister.”

  “Aye. Anyroad. Father died when he were eight – late ’70s, this’d be. Shortly after that a new feller came along, one Adrian Walsh. Which is where things get interesting.”

  “Go on.”

  “Their mother died not long after marrying Walsh. She were already on Valium – looks like she upped the dosage, or someone upped it for her. And one night she took too many.”

  “But nothing anyone could prove?”

  “’Course not. Ben also gave me the number for a lass who were a social worker at the time. There were suspicions, apparently. Stuff that’d ring alarm bells in a flash these days. Both kids were quiet and withdrawn. Unexplained bruises. That kind of thing.”

  Renwick handed him his cup. “Left the teabag in. Never get it strong enough for you.”

  “I’m not happy till I can creosote the fence with it.”

  “So, there were suspicions.”

  “Nowt they ever proved. But... fast-forward to 1985 and a little thing called Operation Clean Sweep.” Stakowski poked the teabag with a spoon. “Remember the other day, we were talking ’bout a suspected paedophile ring in Kempforth, back in the ’80s? Not that they’d’ve called it that back then, but that were what it was.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I were still in the army when that were going on. But guess which case files I were reading before Cowell turned up?”

  “You can read?”

  “Bog off. Ma’am.”

  “STATION HOTEL,” SAID Crosbie.

  In the passenger seat, Anna glanced into the back of the car. Cowell gazed out of one window; Vera looked out of the other, eyes lost and distant. Martyn was squeezed between them, shoulders hunched in, scowling. Anna managed not to smile.