So, several weeks after she had disappeared from the face of the earth, Daisy re-emerged at St Mary’s Hospital near Paddington. From that moment on, many people wanted to talk to her; they just couldn’t wait to find out what had happened.
The first one was the surgeon who had carried out the operations on Daisy’s ears in order to restore her damaged eardrums. Within a few days, when he had ascertained that the patient was recuperating well, he appeared at her bedside to interrogate her. Of course Daisy still couldn’t hear a thing, her ears were swathed in bandages and the wounds still healing. But being an ear specialist, the man was used to such situations. Only, in this case it was not a sign language interpreter that he needed to charter, as he sometimes did, but a so-called “transcriber”, a person specialised in the transcription of important documents into Braille.
The surgeon brought this lady transcriber along with him and presented his mysterious patient to her. Daisy raised herself and sat up straight. She knew that it was her doctor, his aftershave was familiar by now, and she identified the smell and the perfume of a lady she did not know. A bed tray was placed in front of her, straddling her lap, and the unknown lady placed a tape writer, a small Braille machine on it. Daisy fingered the familiar keys, three on the left, three on the right and a big one in the middle. “A tape writer,” she exclaimed, “I haven’t touched one of these for ages! We used them a lot at school to take notes or make corrections. We would put the notes between the pages of our Braille schoolbooks, and the correction strips we would paste on in our essays and so on… We were using those strips all the time. At home nowadays I only use the full-scale Perkins Brailler, of course…”
In the meantime the lady had taken place at a small table with another tape writer in front of her, and she wrote in Braille what the surgeon dictated. Then a little peace of embossed tape was placed in Daisy’s hands to read.
WE DID NOT KNOW THAT YOU CAN SPEAK?
“Oh, but I talk to the nurses all the time, didn’t they tell you? They always jump out of their skin the first time I talk to them, just like you did just now—most probably—but I really try to be gentle about it, I mean, I always know exactly when I haven’t met a nurse before, I keep tabs on them, I know them by smell, so I say, ‘Are you new? You smell so good!’ But anyway, I found out pretty soon after my hearing was destroyed that I could—indeed—still speak. It is apparently something you never unlearn…” Daisy was feeling very chatty, she had an irrepressible urge to prattle…
Another piece of tape was put into her hands.
CAN YOU GIVE US YOUR NAME AND PARTICULARS?
“Oh, of course! My name is Daisy Hayes, born the twenty-first of November 1922 in Barnsbury, London. But you know, you could have found my name and particulars in my handbag, if only you had looked… I mean, I’m awfully sorry that you had to operate on me and all that without even knowing who I am…”
WE DO NOT SEARCH PATIENTS’ HANDBAGS.
“No, of course, sorry! Now, please tell me something, Doctor. Have the operations been successful? Shall I be able to hear again? I mean, I really appreciate all you’ve done for me so far, of course. I don’t want to sound ungrateful or anything, I just want to know, that’s all!”
YES. DON’T WORRY. IN DUE TIME YOU WILL HEAR AGAIN.
“Oh, what a relief! I can’t tell you how glad I am. You know, my chatting may give you the wrong impression, but as a matter of fact it is awful for a blind person to be surrounded by complete silence all of a sudden… I can’t even hear myself speaking—literally—while I’m talking! Anyway, is there something you wanted to ask me? As you’ve gone to the trouble of bringing along a friendly and competent transcriber, I’m assuming you too have something on your mind…”
YES. YOUR EARDRUMS WERE BADLY BUTCHERED. WHAT HAPPENED?
“Well, that’s hard to say. I was chloroformed in my sleep when it happened, and when I woke up I was deaf and my ears were bleeding. That is when I put in those little pieces of cloth that you probably had to pry loose and extricate when you operated me… The only thing I know is that the man who did it was talking about using an awl or a sharpened screwdriver to pierce my eardrums.”
WHO IS THIS MAN? WHO DID THIS TO YOU?
“Again I cannot tell you much, dear Doctor. He never told me his name. And as I’m blind I never saw him and cannot describe him. He kidnapped me on the street one night and shut me up in a cellar somewhere. I have no idea of the exact location; somewhere in London, apparently. Oh yes, and he raped me almost every night for a couple of weeks… That’s all I know.”
SORRY. MY CONCERN IS THAT THIS MAN MIGHT DO THE SAME THING TO OTHER VICTIMS.
Suddenly the deaf and blind patient started toggling the keys of the tape writer still placed in front of her on the bed tray. While she typed proficiently, she said, “Listen, Doctor, what I am writing on this tape is strictly confidential. You and the transcriber must promise to keep this information to yourselves. Consider it as a medical secret, yes? And I’ll ask you to please leave me alone now, when you’ve read this… All right?”
She handed over a little piece of embossed tape, which the surgeon handed over to the transcriber sitting at the table. The lady read it, then stood up and came close to the medical man, and with a stricken expression on her face, she whispered Daisy’s message in his ear.
DO NOT WORRY ABOUT OTHER VICTIMS. I KILLED THE MAN WHO DID THIS TO ME.
Then, a few days later, the doctor was back, and gave Daisy another strip of Braille to read.
THERE IS A MAN NAMED RICHARD CLAYTON WHO WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU. IS THAT ALL RIGHT?
“Oh yes! He is my current ex-husband, so please let him come in!”
A moment later Richard was there at her side, folding her into his powerful arms. Daisy noticed straight away that he was not wearing his uniform, but a light sweater. Then something even more unusual happened. Her ex-husband, still her occasional lover, started sobbing. At least his shoulders were shaking in that typical way… Daisy had never witnessed such a thing before. Suddenly she longed to hear Rick’s voice. It made her realise that she still loved him a great deal. It made her heart ache.
“Oh, darling, hush! You were worried about me, huh?”
Rick spontaneously started nodding against her forehead, pressing her cheek in the nook of his shoulder.
— Yes.
“I bet you were looking for me? You went to the police?”
— Yes, yes.
“Well, I’m going to be all right now, see? The operations on my eardrums were a success… You know, when I was being held by that pervert, I thought of you, my skipper, how you used to admonish the crew: ‘Stay sharp! Stay sharp!’”
Rick didn’t answer. He just kept on holding on to Daisy in a tight grip, and the sobbing subsided.
“Remember that time you took me along on a bombing run to Berlin?”
— Yes.
“Just before you started the engines, you said to me on the intercom, ‘If you want to get off the plane, this is your last chance to do so.’ Well, I realised at that moment that you were the real thing, just like Ralph, a real bomber skipper! That is when I kind of fell in love with you, or at least I realised that you could very well stand in Ralph’s shoes…”
Rick made no answer to that. He loosened his grip, suddenly realising that Daisy needed his sympathy as much has he needed consolation from her… So his embrace became much softer, he caressed his ex-wife’s shoulders.
At length Daisy said, “If you care so much for me, maybe we should get back together one of these days, don’t you think?”
— No!
Daisy sighed, “You’d rather not, huh?”
— No.
“Well, I think I can see why. It’s because I’m a lady with too many dark secrets, am I right?”
— Yes!
The third delegation that came to the hospital to check on Daisy was the police: two detectives from Scotland Yard. By this time Daisy could use her hearing again, albeit only with the help of a hearing aid. If you spoke loudly and she tuned the amplifier at maximum volume, she could hear you as if you were talking from a great distance. As she told her surgeon, “It’s wonderful to be able to hear again, but for the moment it feels as if I’m sitting at the bottom of a deep well.”
“Please be patient,” the man replied, “My therapy is based on the premise that it is a good idea to stimulate your eardrums as much as possible as early as possible… In that respect, I’m going against the opinion of most of my older colleagues, who believe only in absolute rest in order to let the restored organs heal fully, before even trying to use them for the first time.”
“Well, I’m happy with your approach, sir. I’m very eager to make progress as fast as I can…”
So the police officers were welcome to interview the patient, but they were told to speak up, loud and clear. Unfortunately, this meant that the detective who was leading the inquiry started to shout at the top of his lungs, leaning in very close to the lady he wanted to interrogate, inflicting the full force of his foul breath on her. There was a second police officer in a wheelchair, a remarkable fact that Daisy was not aware of, especially as her hearing was too weak yet to notice that one of the two men in the room was not producing any footfalls. The wheelchair man just remained seated at a distance without interfering.
“Mrs Hayes!” the first officer yelled. “I want you to tell us in your own words what exactly happened to you these past few weeks!”
Daisy was able to give the man all the details of her abduction. She remembered exactly the name of the street and the day and time. On the other hand she couldn’t tell whether it had still been light, or dark. “You’d have to check your calendar for the ephemeris of that day.” And of course she couldn’t say anything about the streetlights either. “The man must have been shadowing me from his car, and at the first opportunity he chloroformed me and took me to his underground lair…”
“And is there anything you can tell us about this man, Mrs Hayes? Tall, short, any particulars?”
“Well, he’s a smoker, that I could smell on his breath while he was raping me night after night… He must be a bit shorter than I am and rather fat… He never told us his name; he forced us to call him Master at all times. Loretta had met him at her hippie commune before her abduction, and at the time the man had called himself ‘Jumping Jack’, that is all I know about him… Of course it doesn’t help to be blind, in such a case. I believe that as a blind person I am not even authorised to identify people anyway…”
“Well, be that as it may, ‘Jumping Jack’ is an alias we are already aware of…”
Now of course the metropolitan police also knew everything about Daisy’s quest on behalf of Martin McCullough, they were apprised of the unfortunate newspaper report about the “Blind Angel of Wrath”…
“So after your abduction you did find the girl you were looking for?”
“Oh yes, there was a young girl there with me in that horrible man’s cellar. Only, as I am blind, again, I have no way of telling you what she looked like. My testimony would never stand in court, of course… But she did manage to tell me that she was Loretta McCullough. That was before my hearing was destroyed, you understand.”
On the subject of her escape, Daisy became very vague, claiming complete ignorance due to the fact that she had been deaf and blind at the time. The police detective became very impatient.
“But surely you can tell us something about how you managed to get out of there, Mrs Hayes!”
“I have really no idea, Inspector! Can you imagine how it is for a blind person to lose her hearing?”
“No, sorry about that. But I take it that it was the girl who somehow managed to effect your escape?”
“Yes, yes, obviously. I think our kidnapper must have become rather careless after he pierced my eardrums. There is one thing I can tell you in that respect…”
Now Daisy explained the procedure of the neck clamp that the kidnapper used to transfer his sex slaves from one cell to another. “So, the thing is, after he took away my hearing, this horrible man became very keen to rape me. But he no longer bothered to choke me with the device while he was transferring me. And my predicament apparently made him so randy, that he must have forgotten Lorry altogether and thrown all caution to the wind. My guess is that she got hold of the keys and effected our escape during the day, when the Master was not there…”
“All right, Mrs Hayes, so the girl brings you outside the cellar, and then what?”
“We go out of the house. I could smell the fresh air. Then we take the tube. I could feel the rumblings of the escalators and of the trains. Then she brought me to this hospital.”
“So you are positive that Loretta McCullough was alive and well, and escorted you all the way to the hospital door?”
“Yes, of course! Ask the staff who were on duty that day. They must have seen her.”
“Well, the strange thing is, Mrs Hayes, that the girl has disappeared again without leaving a trace…”
“Good Lord! I’m awfully sorry about that. But maybe she will turn up at her parents’ house eventually, or here at the hospital, you know: to see if I’m all right… And I’ll make sure to leave my address at the reception when I’m discharged, so she can find me.”
“You do that Mrs Hayes… And let us know if she turns up.”
For the first time the second policeman, who all the while had listened in silence from his wheelchair, piped up.
“Excuse me, Mrs Hayes, just one more question, if you please. Then we will leave you alone. What exactly did the girl tell you her name was? Can you try to reconstruct the very first conversation you had with her?”
“Sure, I’ll try. I said: ‘Loretta? Is that you?’ And she said: ‘Yes. But please call me Lorry. Everybody calls me Lorry’ And I said something like, ‘Funny name for a girl.’ And even though I thought it a bit ridiculous, I called the girl Lorry, and when I forgot to do so, and called her Loretta instead, she would sometimes be quite angry… Is this any help at all?”
“Yes, yes, Mrs Hayes, you are being very helpful, thank you. But what I have to ascertain now is this: you didn’t ask the girl ‘who are you?’ or ‘what’s your name?’ Are you absolutely positive that you gave the name away, as in: ‘Is that you, Loretta?’ Which was it?”
“Oh, I see what you’re getting at, sir. I did indeed give the name away…”
“And did the girl ever volunteer the name McCullough as her family name?”
“No, she did not… You’re absolutely right, sir. For all we know the girl may not be Loretta McCullough at all.”
“Good! That at least is clear now. Just another question, if you’ll pardon me: is there any physical clue you can think of, that could give us an idea of where you were being held? Anything you could—literally—put your finger on?”
“Yes! Now that you mention it: when I put my hand to the wall next to my bed and probed its texture with my fingertips, I could feel smooth concrete, with the sharply edged pockmarks left by air bubbles… I would suggest that ‘Loretta’ and I were being held in a nuclear fallout shelter, an antiatomic bomb bunker from the fifties.”
It took a while before the next visitor turned up, looking for answers that only Daisy could provide. By this time the patient was back at home at her flat in Tufnell Park, able to look after herself again, but still needing a hearing aid set at maximum amplitude for the time being. The surgeon was hopeful that she would soon manage to do without. He was very anxious for his method, which he called “dynamic healing”, to succeed. He told Daisy that she should be as active as possible. “Within reason, of course. Just take up your normal life again.” And as she was only too eager to do precisely that, he called her “the ideal patient.”
She was reunited with her good friend Mrs Maurois, who on the first evening invited herself to cook a meal at her neighbour’s place and help her settle down. They sorted through the mail that had accumulated for several weeks. Among other things, Daisy was particularly thrilled by a postcard from Birmingham, depicting canals and bridges and navigation tunnels, under the heading “Birmingham Canal Navigation”. Mrs Em read out loud the message at the back.
“Dear Daisy, thank you very much for your help. Dragon and I are so happy! We’re both undergraduates at the Uni now, and we’re living together on a barge just like those on the pictures. Please ask a friend to describe them to you. It’s pure bliss. Daisy-hugs from Roxanne and Dragon.”
Mrs Em also reported at length on the visit—and the endeavours to find her—of Richard Clayton, “That nice second husband of yours, who still cares a great deal about you!” On that first evening the good old lady didn’t leave before Daisy went to bed.
Then one day, when Daisy was alone at home, there was a knock at the front door. This was a sure sign that she had an unexpected visitor, for the door was never locked and most callers just entered and said “Hello!” So she walked over and opened the door, sniffed the air, and tentatively said, “McCullough?”
“Yup. You’ve got it in one, Daisy Hayes…”
“What do you want?”
“We need to talk, Daisy. May I come in?”
“Nope. You have already violated the sanctuary of my home once in the past; you are no longer welcome here…”
“But we need to talk. Come on…”
“Well, we can talk here, at the door.”
“Okay, okay, suit yourself. You’re mad at me, huh?”
“You could say that, yes.”
“Well, listen, have a heart. I’m pretty desperate too. Loretta has disappeared again! That is: she never showed up at home. The police tell me that a young girl was seen to deliver you at the entrance of the hospital a couple of weeks ago, but if that was Loretta, she hasn’t shown up at our place. So where is she? It wouldn’t be like her at all, after what she’s been through, not to come and see us, at least to say hello to her mom and her kid brother!”
“How should I know where she is, McCullough. I was deaf as well as blind when we escaped the pervert’s dungeon, as you probably heard. If she told me where she was going, I couldn’t have heard it anyway.”
“But are you sure this girl was Loretta?”
“How should I know, for crying out loud! I told you at the time that it was an illusion to think I would make a better sleuth, somehow, than any seeing person. So now you just have to accept the fact that I never saw the girl, I couldn’t recognize her from a photograph, and I can’t give you a description of what she looked like, all right? On the other hand, if I heard her voice again, maybe then…”
“Well, I have the feeling that you are not being entirely level with me… nor with the cops. You know more than you’re letting on…”
“My-my, aren’t we having a conversation like genuine Hollywood gangsters? If you want me to level with you, McCullough, you’ll have to do the same with me. Remember that little article in the newspaper about the ‘Blind Angel of Wrath’? I’m still wondering if that was not your handiwork?”
“Come on, Daisy, we’ve already discussed this. I told you the man must have overheard our conversation at the art exhibition and all that…”
“All right, whatever you say. But if you tell me the truth, I can give you an interesting piece of physical evidence about your daughter, something I actually kept from the police. Interested?”
“Of course! What do you want from me?”
“Well, the truth, that’s all. Did you or did you not talk to that journalist?”
“All right! Yes, I did…”
“There, then. Is that so hard to admit? So your intention from the very beginning was to use me as a bait, am I right? Oh! and wait a minute… Come to think of it: the journalist’s presence at my opening wasn’t entirely fortuitous either, was it? You tipped him off, you made damn sure he would be there in the first place!”
“Yes, yes! And it worked, didn’t it?”
“Oh, you certainly got what you wanted! I paid a heavy price, but I managed to get your daughter out of the pervert’s clutches…”
“And did you kill the man?”
“Was I supposed to? You didn’t say I should, not specifically… I mean, I’m not going to tell you if I did… I can’t trust you. You could use it against me, like you did before…”
“Oh! Come on! Can’t you tell me a little more about what happened? How was it down there? What did the pervert do to you? What kind of a sick bastard was he? And how did my baby cope with all the horror? ”
“Look, do I owe you my life story? I don’t think so… The man was not worse than you. And if you want more details, go to the police and ask to see their report… I believe I’ve paid a heavy price for what I did in 1950, right? Now we’re even… You got exactly what you wanted.”
“Well at least don’t forget to give me that piece of physical evidence you just promised me…”
“Oh yes! You’re entitled to that now, of course. Just wait a second; I’ll get it for you.”
Daisy disappeared inside the flat, closing and locking the front door behind her. A moment later she reappeared at the door, holding Loretta’s Celtic cross on its silver chain in her hand.
“Do you recognise this, McCullough? Loretta gave it to me, and I think I was supposed to keep it. You know, I told her how you had blackmailed and manipulated me into helping you to find her, and at the time she was no longer so proud to be a real McCullough anyway… But I’ve just decided that maybe she wouldn’t mind too much if I handed this over to you, even though she no longer wants to have anything to do with you…”
Martin McCullough snatched the tiny cross from Daisy’s outstretched hand and looked at it intently. After a lengthy silence, a strange and unexpected thing happened: Daisy heard a deep sigh, and then the man burst out into loud sobbing. As he started to weep like a lost soul, she thought,