“Listen, Daisy Hayes, it says here, ‘Mrs Hayes and Mr McCullough were not available for comment,’ so how can you say that I went and blabbed to that reporter? It doesn’t make sense!”
Daisy was on the phone again, trembling with rage and frustration. “Now you listen to me, you bastard! I find this whole thing very fishy, and that’s an understatement!”
“Well, I can only protest my innocence again! The man must have overheard us at the opening, then he must have done some research. There’s nothing in that piece that is not public knowledge. Your story was published as an inquest report at the time; my story has been all over the papers a year ago, because I did all I could to raise public awareness of Loretta’s disappearance…”
“And then there’s a large picture of me, in a high circulation Sunday paper!”
“I know! Very unfortunate! I agree with you entirely…”
“And you do understand what this means, don’t you? I’ll just have to stop my investigation, at least for the time being, as the whole situation has become too dangerous for me…”
“No, no, Daisy Hayes, you must carry on regardless! I know how much you care for poor Loretta, and as her father I’m very grateful for that. But that is precisely why you must carry on. Do it for her. And if this unfortunate business in the Sunday paper can encourage the pervert to manifest himself, all the better!”
“Yes, but that’s easy for you to say; you’re not the one at risk!”
“Well, whether you keep searching or not will no longer make a difference in that respect. The harm is done; you might as well carry on!”
“You certainly have the gift of the gab, don’t you, McCullough?”
But it was no use. The man had already hung up. Daisy felt like dialling back immediately and venting her fury some more, but she already knew that the man would not pick up the phone a second time.
Right after Mrs Maurois had read the article to her, Daisy had started to hear of it left and right. She had found out that everybody had read it. For instance, when she had gone to work on Monday, the first of her two and a half weekly workdays at the group practice, her favourite colleague, Astrid, had discreetly taken her aside. “My dear Daisy, are you aware of the fact that there’s an article published about you in a major national Sunday paper?”
“I suppose you’re referring to ‘Blind Angel of Wrath’?”
“Yes! And is it true? Did you find out singlehandedly that your husband had been poisoned by his crew?”
“Well, that’s not exactly what happened…”
“And are you really looking for this Loretta girl?”
“Yes, that much is true.”
“Well then, you are a real-life blind sleuth! Incredible, you never cease to amaze one! Nice picture of you, by the way…”
Then Victor had phoned and told her, “Now I’m starting to understand what kind of a dirty little game McCullough is playing. One way or another he must be responsible for this…”
“Yes, but he’s never going to admit it.”
“True, and short of leaving the country for a while, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Well, I’m hoping that Rick will come back one of these days. When he gets in touch, which he’s bound to do eventually, I’ll ask him to take me with him to Singapore or Sydney or somewhere like that…”
“Do that, yes. It would be a relief to us all—I mean also Blanche, and the crew of course—if we could be sure that you’re safe.”
With Stella, her mother-in-law, and Beatrice, and Margery, it had been rather touching. All three of them phoned to express their concern, but as they were “gentry”—whatever that meant nowadays—they would never admit to reading a Sunday paper, so they all had a similar story at the ready, to the effect that “the charwoman”, or “a friend”, a “colleague” had drawn their attention to the alarming article. Even her parents, who were not gentry, had found out about it indirectly, or so they claimed. At any rate, the story was being widely circulated, and even though Daisy knew that her fame would not last longer than a week or two, it was clear that the man who was responsible for Loretta’s disappearance was not going to forget her that easily.
Daisy decided to carry on with her investigation, but out of sight, from behind the scenes so to speak. The next point on the agenda was to seek the advice of her neighbourhood chemist, Dobbs junior, as Victor had suggested. Daisy found it a bit awkward to make an appointment with the man. For many years now she’d had a purely professional relationship with him, based mainly on the need for antiseptic ointments and pain killers to tend to her birth defect. And for birth control devices, which was a highly confidential matter, of course. When she called on him at his pharmacy this time, however, it was the first time that she needed his help in a less professional, but at the same time even more confidential capacity. But the “young” man, who was only about ten years her junior, turned out to be very eager to help, and to raise his relationship with Daisy to a more personal level. In fact, as a shy man is sometimes wont to do, he invited himself for dinner at her home.
“Pardon me if I’m being overly bold, but you see, I’m a bachelor, so I love to dine in good company. Of course I could ask you out to a local restaurant, but I gather that we have rather delicate matters to discuss…”
“Well, what gives you that idea?”
“Oh, erm, a certain article in a certain Sunday newspaper?”
“Oh, of course! Silly question! Well, I’ll be delighted to cook something for you; something simple. How about this evening?”
“Perfect! I’ll come to your place as soon as I’ve closed the shop.”
And so that same evening Daisy was serving her shy pharmacist a plate of spaghetti with diced and fried chicken meat and spinach with Italian herbs—a personal recipe—and refilling his glass with Italian red wine in the hope of loosening him up a little. At length Dobbs junior blurted out, “So you already lived here with Ralph, before he was murdered?”
“That’s right, we bought the place in the spring of forty-one, when we were both eighteen years of age.”
“So that’s… twenty-five, no, twenty-six years you’ve been here?”
“Apparently, yes… It does make me feel old when you put it that way!”
“Well I’m sorry about that… And did you ever remarry, if I may ask?”
“Yes… yes. I remarried in fifty-two with another bomber pilot, Richard Clayton. But in the meantime we are separated.”
“And did you live here with Mr Clayton as well?”
“Yes, but as an intercontinental pilot he was not often at home…”
“But still, if you ever should marry again, I would suggest that you move to a bigger place. Even though this flat is very cosy, it is rather small, and it seems to me that it might be a problem for a husband to live here with you…”
“Well, I’ve never thought of that, but I must admit that it’s a sound piece of advice.”
“Thank you. Now, you had some sensitive inquiries to put to me; I guess it has to do with this Loretta McCullough?”
“Yes, yes, let’s get down to brass tacks. I was discussing Loretta’s case with my good friend Victor Hadley the other day; you know him; you met him at the opening…”
“Oh yes: Mr Hadley. He seems to be a very smart man, and he’s quite devoted to you.”
“Well, he suggested that in the event that a kidnapper would be keeping a young girl against her will, he would need some “medication” to keep her in check. Things like barbiturates, opiates, or chloroform. Now, Victor thought you might be able to help me with a list of people who ordered such a combination of drugs in the London area, starting a year ago… There are probably not many people who buy something like that?”
“Hmm… Though it is an excellent line of reasoning, of course, my dear Daisy—may I call you Daisy?—I’m afraid that there would be literally thousands of people in London alone who would have a perfectly legitimate reason to order these items… You see, every GP, every dentist, every medical practitioner in town would prescribe these products on a regular basis.”
“Oh… I see… I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I’m awfully sorry to have to disappoint you… On the other hand, the chloroform at least would have to be ordered apart, specifically for medical practitioners registered by name… By the way, your spaghetti is delicious; I’m really impressed that you can cook at all, if I may say so…”
“You may say so, yes. A blind person just has to be a lot more cautious than normal people do… Now listen, Mr Dobbs…”
“Please, Daisy, call me Michael!”
“Well, Michael, I have to tell you something about my relationship with Loretta’s father… The man is forcing me to help him through a subtle form of blackmail; he is manipulating me like some kind of pawn; that piece in the newspaper must have literally been dictated by him to the journalist…”
“Good heavens! I think I saw that McCullough at your opening, didn’t I? I recognized him from pictures in the papers a year back. Well, I didn’t like the look of him…”
“And what did he look like? Can you describe him?”
“Military appearance; hooked nose, crew cut, thin lips, and when he forces a smile on his grim face he looks like a wolf.”
“Excellent. I get the picture: charming man!”
“And is there nothing you can do to keep him in check?”
“Well, yes. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. What I really need to do now, is to give this McCullough chap a list of some kind—something pretty convincing—and tell him to do some legwork of his own, just to keep him off my back… You see what I mean?”
“Yes, I see. We must try to come up with something workable, then? Let me think… Here’s one possible idea: let us say that the perpetrator is a medical practitioner of some kind, holding a young girl against her will and abusing her… So he not only needs chloroform and such, but he also needs to administer a contraceptive to his victim…”
“The pill!”
“Exactly! Now, as it happens I could obtain a usable list of names from my supplier. You see, Dobbs’ Chemists is part of a network of shops that order all their drugs centrally. Ours is the biggest such network in the land, and we have a central computer to take care of the staggering flow of orders… I happen to know the man in charge of the computer, and I can ask him for a list of all our customers who order chloroform and a contraceptive pill on a regular basis. If this is feasible at all, the machine should be able to spit out such a list within minutes!”
“Incredible! And how many names do you recon you would get?”
“A few hundred at most, I suppose.”
“That’s still a lot. Maybe we could drop central London and only take the outer neighbourhoods into account. After all, the kidnapper is most likely to be holding the girl in a freestanding single family home on the outskirts of town…”
“Yes, that is possible, if the list should indeed turn out to be too long… But there’s another possibility I thought of just now, and it would have the advantage of keeping McCullough very busy…”
“I’m all ears!”
“The pervert is not likely to be married, so there should be very few male customers ordering the pill who do not have a wife or a daughter. This can easily be checked at the General Register Office, though not by a blind person, obviously. So I say let McCullough do it. If he does the job properly, he should end up with only a handful of highly suspect people… Unmarried men who ordered chloroform and the pill!”
“Now that, my dear Michael, is excellent thinking! I want you to get me that list as soon as possible! And by the way, could you ask the computer man for a duplicate? I might want to study the names on that list myself…”
“I can certainly ask for a duplicate, yes, but how are you going to read it?”
“Well, I’ll have it copied out in Braille by a transcriber, a sighted person who transcribes documents for a fee…”
“Oh, I see! And you’re thinking of carrying on an investigation of your own?”
“Maybe. You know, I’m really very concerned about Loretta’s plight, and I’m still anxious to find out what happened to her. Now, for reasons of his own, McCullough doesn’t want to get the police involved, but in the end, they would be the ones that could really do something with that list!”
After the Blind Angel of Wrath-piece had appeared in the paper, Martin McCullough started calling on a regular basis. That is to say, he made sure to keep the pattern of his calls as irregular as he could, sometimes ringing very early, before Daisy left for work, sometimes late at night, just as she was about to go to bed, and at any time in between. Daisy realised that he was checking on her, and reflected, “If I no longer answer the phone, he’ll have to conclude that I’ve been abducted by Loretta’s kidnapper…” So for a while she stopped answering her phone. She also decided to stay at home as much as possible, but she still needed to go to work and to the shops for groceries.
Then one day her new friend Michael Dobbs came round with the promised computer list. Daisy was much impressed, and put one copy in an envelope to send to Loretta’s father, and made sure to set apart the other copy for herself. As soon as the pharmacist had left, she picked up the phone and dialled McCullough’s special number.
“Daisy Hayes, is that you! I tried to reach you several times lately, but you were playing hard to get…”
“Well, you don’t sound very happy to be hearing my voice!”
“Oh, but I’m delighted! I was getting very worried about you.”
“Well, tell that to someone who actually believes it! Anyway, I have something interesting for you: a list of people who have ordered chloroform and a contraceptive in the past year. My source is a pharmacist… and he suggested that if one would run this list by the General Register Office, one could sift out the unmarried men and end up with only a handful of highly suspect people. Of course, as I’m blind, I couldn’t do this little piece of vetting by myself, but the question is: are you interested? Shall I send you this list?”
“Yes, yes, by all means! I’d certainly like to take a look at it. Good work…”
“All right, then, what is your address?”
“Well, I’m not going to disclose my address to you, obviously, but you can send the material to my PO box in town. You have that Braille thingy at hand?”
“Always at the ready! Let’s have that PO box, then.”
And as soon as she had punched the address on a card, Daisy said, “I’ll post it to you, McCullough. Now it’s your turn to do some legwork…” But of course he had already hung up.
Then all Daisy had to do was to write down the address of the box on the envelope. She mastered the Latin alphabet perfectly, like most blind people, and used a special writing frame to get the lines straight. In a drawer she had her stamps sorted, each value labelled in Braille. So she stuck the correct stamps on the envelope and put it in her handbag, intending to drop it in a post-box on her way to her next rendezvous.
Daisy regularly went out with her sister-in-law Margery; a while ago they had made an appointment to go to the cinema together, and Daisy didn’t want to miss it, even under the present circumstances. So she was off to Leicester Square, where she met up with her old friend, and they went to a summer rerun of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.
Margery always found it fascinating how her blind relation enjoyed “attending” a film; Daisy didn’t even want her to describe what was happening in between dialogues, because “it would disturb the other moviegoers”. But when they discussed the film afterwards, it appeared that she didn’t miss a beat of the plot or of the action. In fact, it was also fascinating to hear how Daisy could sometimes perceive details that had escaped her, Margery, probably because she’d been distracted by what she was looking at.
On this evening Daisy was quite excited by an idea that had occurred to her at the end of Dr Strangelove, when the whole cast of characters convened in a fancy War Room and discussed plans for their own survival in mineshafts transformed into huge, luxury nuclear fallout shelters. In the lobby on the way out, Daisy asked, “Do you remember the Cold War panic in the fifties, Margery? Even in London there were people who had fallout shelters installed in their back gardens… Now, what if Loretta’s kidnapper had such a bunker at his disposal? That would be ideal for his purposes!”
She asked Margery to guide her to the phone booths in the cinema lobby, and there she made another call to Martin McCullough, telling him the idea she’d had, and suggesting that he start looking for people who had built atomic bomb shelters in the fifties. “By comparing that information with the pharmacist’s list, you should be able to identify your man, McCullough!”
After that, the two friends went to an Italian restaurant for a late dinner. Then finally it was time to call it a night and to say goodbye. Margery lived across the river near Kennington Park; Daisy had to head north to Tufnell Park. They parted at the Leicester Square Tube station.
There was a non-descript man standing by the side of the pavement, leaning against the front door of a non-descript van—an old Bedford van like thousands of others—while he was smoking a cigarette. He seemed to be waiting for something; he had been there for a couple of hours now, sometimes disappearing inside the van, sometimes emerging to smoke another cigarette in the balmy summer evening. The man was obviously a bit nervous; in fact he was excited and apprehensive at the same time. He was looking forward to the fruition of his plans, but he was also acutely aware of taking a tremendous risk. “Luring some silly little hippie girl to your house is one thing,” he mumbled to himself at some point, “but kidnapping a grownup woman on the open street is something else…”
Still, he had worked out his plans very carefully, and everything was in place right now. He had found his quarry’s address, located her flat building, observed her movements for several days. She was indeed a very sexy little number, just as her picture in the paper had suggested! She was out tonight, bound to come back in the course of the evening, and he had parked his faithful van on a very quiet street she always took on her way home from the Tube station… During the last couple of hours he had hardly seen any passers-by; it was the kind of short, narrow backstreet where almost no one ever ventured, but it happened to be a shortcut for this Daisy Hayes number. On top of that the lamppost right next to the van was out of order: the man had made sure of that. Wearing non-descript worker’s overalls and a cap, he had taken a ladder out of his van, climbed up to the light, and sabotaged it. That had been before nightfall, of course, but even if someone had seen him at work, they would have been none the wiser. Now the little street around him was plunged into darkness and gloom. Perfect!
Suddenly the man heard the tap-tapping of the blind woman’s cane, and he sprang into action. Daisy Hayes was coming! He retrieved a rag from the left-hand pocket of his overalls, and a little bottle of chloroform from his right-hand pocket. He started emptying the contents of the bottle onto the rag: “Glug-glug-glug!”
He slipped out of sight behind the van. Of course he knew that the woman couldn’t possibly see him, but she might smell the chloroform… As she approached, he made ready to pounce on her. And as soon as she came up to the level of his van, the man sprang forward, his rag drenched in chloroform at the ready. When Daisy heard his footfalls, she cried out, “Is that you, McCullough?” Those were her last words before she was grabbed and chloroformed.
A moment later the van roared off, the driver handling the steering wheel like a real-life getaway gangster, his inanimate victim prone in the passenger seat next to him, her head resting on his lap, her face pressing against the front of his overalls. “The magic is working again!” the man cried out. “I’m having a fantastic hard-on!”
In the end, only an abandoned white cane lying on the pavement indicated that anything untoward had happened in that empty, darkened backstreet.