‘And I find you quite offensive, young man. Are you saying that my family, which can be traced back to William the Conqueror, knows nothing about art?’
‘No, madam, I’m not criticizing your family. I’m telling you it is not worth your while standing in this queue for the next two hours or so with this particular painting – it has very little value, fifty pounds perhaps if you were lucky. If your family does have such a wonderful history, perhaps you could find something else to bring along to a future Antiques Roadshow?’
Both Harry and Freya had been unable to stop themselves from turning round. The woman’s face was puce with rage. As the man moved on to the next painting, Harry couldn’t help himself. ‘What a shame,’ he said. ‘How disappointing for you.’
‘That man is an idiot,’ she retorted. ‘Mr Smarmy has no idea what he is talking about. I’m happy to wait, I’ll show it to the proper expert.’
‘Good luck with that,’ Harry said.
25
Saturday, 28 September
In 1901, a French surgeon, René Le Fort, published his work on a series of experiments he had been carrying out on trauma to human skulls. Among these were dropping cannon balls onto cadaver skulls, crushing skulls in vices, whacking them with wooden clubs, kicking them or simply throwing them against tables and stone walls. From these experiments he determined that there were three predominant types of facial fractures.
This publication contained the definitive templates for surgeons carrying out facial reconstructions for much of the twentieth century. Excluded from Le Fort’s comprehensive work was damage to the facial nerves inflicted by knife trauma, because no knowledge of that field had then existed and there was no mapping of these nerves.
In the early hours of a Saturday morning in 1979, outside a gay club in Brighton’s Kemp Town district, a twenty-two-year-old man’s face had been slashed repeatedly by a modified Stanley knife with a coin inserted between two blades, inflicting a series of parallel, tramline cuts – fortunately missing his eyes – as well as beaten and kicked to a pulp by a trio of youths, to the yells of poof and poofter, and he was left badly injured on the pavement.
The maxillofacial surgeon, Andrew Lyons, at the Royal Sussex County Hospital where Stuart Piper had first been taken, told him some days later, when he had eventually regained consciousness, that his skull had been so badly fractured it resembled a jigsaw puzzle. A week later, when he had been fully stabilized and the feared kidney damage from all the kicks had turned out to be no more than bad bruising, Lyons made the decision, in view of his extensive facial injuries, for Piper to be transferred to the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, under the care of the specialist facial reconstruction plastic and maxillofacial surgeons there.
The Queen Victoria Hospital is credited as the place where the discipline of plastic surgery had begun. Back in the 1940s an extraordinarily talented New Zealander, Archibald McIndoe, later Sir Archie, ensured his fame, and that of the hospital, by treating severely burned Battle of Britain pilots. Such patients did not exist before the Second World War because pilots inevitably perished in their wooden-framed aircraft, which weren’t equipped with parachutes and rapidly went up in flames.
The same was not applicable to the 1940s Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes, whose brave pilots suffering horrific burns were soon arriving at the unit in East Grinstead. By transferring skin from other parts of their bodies, McIndoe was able to reconstruct their disfigured faces and hands. It was a painstakingly slow process. While they would never win any beauty contests, these airmen were given back functioning faces and hands that enabled them to lead normal, active lives again. Although many needed further skin grafts for many decades after.
During the months of reconstructive surgery on Stuart Piper’s face, some former Battle of Britain pilots were still attending the hospital for review and further facial surgery.
Surgeons in the late 1970s did not have the benefit of computerized scanning and 3D reconstructions to tell them precisely where the bones should be and to give them exact details of facial height. Nor were they able to map and repair facial nerves. They simply had to do the best they could to patch up Stuart Piper’s once-handsome features. During all this time, much of it with his face swathed in bandages, Piper had plenty of time to think. He was thinking about two things, with equal fervour. The first was how to build his future career. The second was how to exact his revenge on the people who had done this to him.
On a morning ward round a few days after the latest operation on Piper, the plastic surgeon he was under, Andrew Brown, noticed that Piper could not close his eyelids properly, leaving him with sore, dry eyes and problems sleeping. It was clear that the Stanley knife cuts had seriously and irrevocably damaged both the left and right nerves that controlled facial expression. He also noticed that Piper’s face was flatter on the right than on the left. His eyes were wider apart than they should have been, because the canthal ligaments that should have kept the eyes close to the side of the nose had been crushed, causing a telecanthus.
Despite further surgery, the team of surgeons were unable to correct this, leaving Piper with his left eye further from the centre line than the right. This left him with an unnerving appearance; as it was such a small difference it wasn’t obvious to anyone looking at him, but it made him seem menacing. No one meeting him could understand quite why he made them feel so unsettled. That sensation was worsened by his complete lack of facial expression, other than through his eyes and tiny movements of his mouth.
He was given a further operation to insert gold weights into his upper eyelids, to enable him to close his eyes properly, which left him with a squinting appearance to add to his lack of facial movement.
During the eight months Piper had spent in hospital, the three thugs had been subsequently identified by witnesses, arrested, brought to trial and sentenced, in Piper’s opinion, to ludicrously short prison terms.
But he’d been ready after their release from prison, to ensure they would never do what they had done to him to anyone else, ever again.
A careful, calculating and financially independent young man, happy to bide his time to ensure he wasn’t linked to the revenge attacks on these thugs, Piper picked each one of his attackers off at two-year intervals with the aid of hired muscle.
The first one, the ringleader, he had blinded and melted his face with sulphuric acid, while forcing him to listen, at maximum volume, to the Tom Robinson band playing ‘Glad to be Gay’.
The second and third assailants he’d also badly beaten, satisfied in the knowledge that they would realize the reason for their assault.
Piper was too smart ever to be arrested, or ever connected to these attacks. Just as he’d succeeded in keeping his criminal activities largely under the police radar for decades.
Now approaching his sixty-third birthday, and a fitness fanatic, Piper was in lean shape. He had a narrow face, topped with slick, dyed black hair with carefully curated grey streaks, hard-man looks that reminded people of the actor Clive Owen, but the tramline scars down his cheek giving him a cruel aura. He was invariably dressed in a hand-stitched pinstripe suit, white shirt and sharp tie, even when he was relaxing.