“…shall I tell you about the very first time I became aware of your existence? It was in 1939. When Cedric came back from the summer hols, he told all his mates at school about this girl he’d met, this girl named Daisy Hayes, who was soo beautiful, soo sexy, and totally blind! Blind since birth. The worse kind of blindness, said he, who had suddenly become quite an expert. He even had a small photograph of the whole group of his cousins taken by Ralph’s mother. A Brownie snapshot with a wavy white border. You were in it too, standing there in the middle, and Cedric would point you out to us. Your head was only a tiny smudge, really, but there were enough visual clues to make out the blond curls, the dark glasses, the loveliness…
“We were all fascinated by this story, of course. It struck me that Cedric was apparently quite smitten. Very unusual for him. He not only found you attractive, but seemed to respect you at a deeper level, he who otherwise wold show respect for no one on earth. He told us how you had learned to ride a bicycle and shoot a pistol, and we all agreed that you must be a wonderful girl. Then the others got bored and started to mock Cedric for his infatuation with you. ‘Yeah, yeah, the blind girl, we know! You keep banging on about her; well, come on: a blind girl?” But I kept asking for more details, for more stories, and Cedric was grateful to me for still showing an interest. He kept on talking about ‘the gang’ at Bottomleigh House and all the stuff you kids had been up to that summer. I particularly admired the play you had created: Death of a Corpse! I wished I could have been there and played in it…
“Anyway, that was the first time I became aware of your existence. We were all sixteen or seventeen years old at the time, very prone to falling in love, and I’m afraid I fell in love with the idea of you that I had built up in my mind. I had this idealised representation of you that stayed with me for many years after that.”
By now Daisy was almost purring with pleasure. She enjoyed the caress of Bernard’s voice immensely. It was very male but at the same time very soft and smooth, a crooning sound… yes, that was it: if he hadn’t been a police investigator and a hideously ugly man in a wheelchair, Bernard could have been an old crooner, bringing middle-aged ladies to their knees at evening do’s in derelict seaside resorts. Daisy smiled, and stroked Bernard’s muscular chest with her hand.
“I suppose you weren’t a paraplegic yet?”
“No, not at that moment, but I was to become one soon. The accident happened six months later, and while I suffered hell in a hospital bed as they tried desperately to patch me up, I was thinking of you all the time. It helped me to pull through.”
“And to imagine that I was blissfully unaware of all that… So on V-E Day, when I spoke to you on the phone, you were actually hiding your feelings, even when you said ‘Please call me Bernard’.”
“That’s right. Instead, I could have blurted out: ‘I love you!’ You see, in ’43 Cedric had turned up out of the blue, at the Yard, and he told me how you had found out that your husband had been poisoned. I admired you greatly for that and fell in love all over again with the idea of your existence. Then, when you phoned me on V-E Day, I heard your voice for the first time. It was really you! I was thrilled!”
“And you were wheelchair-bound, then?”
“Of course! That was the only reason I was still doing a civilian job… Didn’t you ever wonder why I was not under arms?”
“No, it never occurred to me.”
“Women. Typical!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Only joking of course.”
“Well… and now that we have made love for the first time, forty-four years on, did I live up to your expectations? I’m an old biddy now…”
“Oh no, you’re not. You’re anything but… Let me tell you something. I sometimes make use of a specialised call-girl. In my situation it’s a justifiable thing to do. The one I do business with at the moment is quite young and beautiful; very competent at handling a paraplegic, and therefore the services provided are worth every penny I pay for them. But what you and I have shared just now is of another order altogether. Pure bliss! So, yes, I can assure you that you lived up to my expectations. And now I have good reason to believe that I’m really in love with you.”
They were lying in each other’s arms in Jonathan’s bed, a single. Bernard was bunched up against the freshly painted wall, Daisy was almost falling off on the other side. She told Bernard that she was going to put her own bed right next to Jonathan’s in order to make it twin beds, so that next time they could be together more comfortably. “Now that he’s gone, I think I’m going to take over this room as my own. It’s a lovely room, don’t you think?”
As she was feeling a cramp coming up, Daisy turned over onto her belly, half crushing Bernard under her weight, which delighted him.
“Isn’t it a problem,” Daisy said, “when a Detective Chief Superintendent goes to bed with a witness, or even a suspect?”
“Only if anyone finds out. I could be dismissed from the force, except that I’m already retired. And if you were ever indicted, you would only need to tell the judge about this in order to get an acquittal.”
“Well, I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing, Bernard. For all the faults I may have, I still pride myself on a certain sense of honour. And I guess you still want to get to the bottom of my relationship with McCullough and all that?”
“Absolutely. But let’s not talk about that for the moment. I owe you a debt of gratitude, by the way: the man’s murder has been solved double quick. The brass will be impressed; they will not regret having called me back; I solved the case for them in about forty-eight hours!”
“Very impressive. Your own merit entirely. Now, I must have made quite an impression without realizing it, yesterday morning, when you set eyes on me for the first time?”
“Yes, you made an impression all right, but it was not the first time I saw you. You may not be aware of it, but we’d already met at St Mary’s Hospital in 1967…”
“What? You don’t say! Wait a minute… there were two cops from the Yard that came to interrogate me. You were one of them?”
“That’s right. And you were almost deaf. We had to shout. I was not very proud of myself, but at the time it was all in a day’s work. I can tell you that I was moved to tears at the sight of you, battered in battle as you were, and I wanted to look at you all the time, which is always difficult to combine with tearfulness. So I kept wiping my eyes with my hanky while I was eating you up! A good job I was sitting behind my colleague’s back and that he was too busy to notice that I wasn’t contributing much to the interrogation…”
“I remember that there were two cops, but I had no idea one of them was in a wheelchair.”
“Oh yes, I was in my chair all right, and I made quite an impression at the hospital. But you were still badly maimed, you couldn’t possibly have registered what was going on around you. Still, when I finally managed to control myself and spoke to you, I immediately had the feeling that you perked up, reached out for me, and that there spontaneously arose a kind of natural rapport between us…”
“Of course! I remember now. You were the one who wanted to know if I had given away Loretta’s name to the girl who was with me in the dungeon. And I realised at once that that was exactly what had gone wrong! It made complete sense. I always know immediately when I’m talking to someone who takes me seriously and who’s making sense.”
“Exactly! You’ve just summed up the very essence of our relationship.”
Daisy announced that it was time to take a bath, and Bernard agreed. Doing the honours as an hostess, she poured the last of the bottle of Italian wine into his glass and bounded over to the bathroom to run a hot bath; then, when everything was ready, she assisted her guest into his wheelchair, rolled him over to the bathtub and helped him to get in. Soon they were settled, Daisy sitting behind Bernard’s back with her arms around his waist. She suddenly felt very protective of him, like a big sister, her heart brimming with tenderness. Then she said, “You know, Bernard, I still don’t understand how we ended up in bed together, just now…”
“Well, darling, for me that is not so hard to fathom. It is what I always wanted. I can’t tell you how often I fantasized about it, or how many times I pleasured myself thinking of it.”
“Oh, I see! So it was not always only romantic longing, was it?”
“No, certainly not. With blokes it never is…”
“Hmm, come to think of it, with girls it isn’t either.”
“There you are then.”
“Yes, but apart from that phone call in ’45 and a meeting in ’67 that I was hardly aware of, you’re a complete stranger to me… I’ve only really met you for the first time yesterday.”
“Yes, but didn’t we just agree that there is a kind of feeling of recognition between us?”
“Yes, I suppose there is… But has it occurred to you at all that I might have seduced you just now in order to wriggle out of the investigation against me?”
“Of course it has crossed my mind! But it is not going to work. For me one thing does not exclude the other, as you can imagine… And has it ever occurred to you that I might be romancing you in order to solve a case?”
“No, of course not! A gentleman would never do such a thing… or would he?”
“Well, that goes to show that you’re a lot more naïve than I am, but I like that about you…”
For a moment they sloshed about in the warm bath, then Daisy asked, “Why did you never seek contact with me before, if you were so much in love?”
“I’m a very shy man, Daisy. Of course I did realise that you wouldn’t be put off by my appearance, being blind and all that, but I was held back because of the wheelchair. What on earth is a blind lady to do with a wheelchair-bound suitor? And then, this morning, I was astounded to find out that you didn’t mind the wheelchair at all.”
“Of course not, silly. Some of my best friends are paraplegics, you know.”
They were quiet for a while. From behind him Daisy put her hands on Bernard’s face and started probing him with her fingertips. “I can see you just as well from behind as from up front. In fact I can see you better from behind, because right now I’m touching your face like I would touch my own; left is left and right is right…”
Bernard giggled. Daisy explored his strangely lopsided features for a moment, and at length she asked, “Do you know that I’m a sculptor?”
“Yes, my dear. After I talked to you at St Mary’s in ’67, I went to see your exhibition. It was still on and having quite some success, as I recall.”
“So you saw my first series of portraits?”
“Yes. Not bad. Not bad at all…”
“Well, I was just thinking, I’d like to do a portrait of you. Would you care to sit for me?”
“Well, I’m not sure about that…”
“Oh, sorry, I understand the problem. But I’m not making myself clear. I wouldn’t portray you as you are, whatever that means, but as I perceive you. In fact I could even do one better. I could portray you through the filter of my feelings for you…”
“Sounds interesting… Yes, now you’re making me curious.”
“It’s very simple, really. As I am not dominated by visual clues, I can pick and choose at will as it were. I could use the undamaged parts of your face to extrapolate what you would have looked like if there hadn’t been an accident… Wouldn’t that be interesting? To see the Bernard that never was but that could have been?”
All the while Daisy’s fingertips were dancing excitedly all over Bernard’s face, making him giggle some more. “For instance, I could duplicate your left cheekbone on the right-hand side, mirrored of course, then the same with the jawbone, and so on. In fact I would be creating an image of how you see yourself. Isn’t it true that you don’t see yourself as a hideous old paraplegic at all? Isn’t that true of every human being? We never see ourselves as we actually are.”
“That’s right! All the criminals I ever met in my career saw themselves as completely innocent…”
Daisy giggled. “Well, to tell you the truth, in my mind I’m still the eighteen-year-old girl who married Ralph. That is who I will always be…”
“Yes, I believe you’re right. That is who you will always be, and it is an immense privilege for me to be allowed to take Ralph’s place for a while.”
“Not for a while. Make that: from now on.”
As they were getting dressed, Daisy remarked, “And to think that only this morning I was having breakfast with Jonathan; everything was perfectly normal, him being his usual obnoxious self…”
“What you just told me about him gives me a lot of food for thought. It was incredibly brave of you to keep the child, and I find it truly tragic that it turned out so badly.”
“Yes. Like most parents I’m now wondering what I did wrong… but most parents don’t ask themselves that question on account of such a gruesome murder.”
“No. That’s what’s so appalling about this… Now, in the telling of your story you’ve also revealed how you killed Jonathan’s father. I’ll need your deposition on that, but there is no haste, of course.”
“All right. I guess we’ll have to get down to it and thrash it out.”
“I’m afraid so, yes. And there’s one question I’m dying to ask, if I may be so bold…”
“Go ahead. There’s no stopping you anyway.”
“Did ‘the girl’ ever get in touch with you after she brought you to the hospital?”
“Yes. She turned up on my doorstep a couple of months later.”
“Well? Tell me more! Does she have a name?”
“Yes, of course. Sue. She told me her complete name just once, the first time she visited, but I’m afraid I can’t remember her family name. Really, I assure you. I only remember vaguely that Sue stands for Susanna.”
“And did Susanna go to the police?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact she did. She went back to her family, and as her Dad had reported her missing nine months earlier, he went to the local police station with her to report that she was back. But the thing is, Sue told vague stories about staying at different hippie communes around the country…”
“Why on earth did she do that? Can’t anyone in this time and age just tell the truth to the police? This really has me stumped, sometimes!”
“Hush, darling. Sue had gone through a very traumatising experience and wanted to be left in peace. Just the idea of what she would have had to tell the police makes your blood curdle! Besides, she felt very much ashamed about what had happened. You see, she had followed the pervert voluntarily, of her own free will. She felt ashamed of having been such a dupe.”
“All right, all right, I get it.”
Meanwhile they had finished getting dressed, and Daisy decided it was time for a nice cup of tea. They proceeded to the kitchen and she put the kettle on. Bernard parked his wheelchair at the table, on the same spot where he’d taken his lunch a couple of hours before. Now he asked Daisy, “Did you learn anything interesting or important from Susanna?”
“Yes. She told me what happened to Loretta. Sue had heard it from the Master, who in his turn was never very reliable, but here goes: Loretta drowned in her own vomit while she was fast asleep from sleeping pills. She was afraid of the dark, sick with grief, and he tried to subdue her with Valium… She must have died in the very first days after the Master had locked her up. He probably buried her under the concrete floor, somewhere in his dungeon.”
“Good God, what a mess! And did you keep in touch with Susanna? Can I speak to her?”
“No, Bernard, you cannot. For a couple of years she kept visiting me every few months to tell me how she was doing. She studied to become an accountant, she who had told me that she was bad at maths… Then she fell in love and was full of plans: getting married, buying a place to live, having kids. But somehow visiting old Daisy no longer fitted into those plans. I reminded her of too many bad things, and besides, little Jonathan gave her the creeps… So she stopped visiting after a few years. When I moved to this place, we hadn’t been in touch for ages.”
“All right. I suppose Susanna wouldn’t have been able to tell me any more than you did just now, anyway…”
“No. She was not a very observant person, nor altogether reliable, believe me. Now it’s my turn to put a question to you that I’ve been dying to ask. Did you ever find the Master’s dungeon? I gave you a clue at the time that it might be a bunker…”
“Well, I tried to follow up on that, but it was no good. Building an atomic fallout shelter is not a crime, so it was never going to show up in the police records. And such bunkers could be built by any building company, so how do you extract this specific information from the thousands of builders working in the metropolitan area? Impossible!”
“I pricked up my ears for a couple of years,” Daisy said, “hoping to hear some news about this affair. A missing person or some such. I was also astonished that the police never came back to me to interrogate me some more.”
“Well that, my dear, you owe to me. I persuaded my colleagues that it would be useless to pester you again, even though I had a distinct feeling that you had kept some information from us.”
“And now you feel you have to pester me with a vengeance!”
“Well, another corpse has turned up, so yes. I was wrong to be too complacent the first time.”
“Hmm. Fair point. Now what would have happened if the Master had been reported missing?”
“We would have searched his house and found the bunker.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh yes. We would have known what we were looking for. We would have used metal detectors and all that…”
“You see, sometimes, when I think about it, I have this vision of a family living in that house, blissfully unaware of the dungeon’s existence, just living their happy family life right on top of a tomb with at least two corpses inside…”
“Well, it could be, but it doesn’t bear thinking about indeed.”
“Indeed not… But you know, I was in the middle of an investigation of my own when the Master captured me… Wait a minute, I must still have the list somewhere.”
“A list?”
“Don’t move, I’ll be back!”
Daisy jumped up from the table and bounded over to another part of the flat, out of sight from where Bernard was sitting. She stayed away for quite some time, and Bernard was just starting to worry a bit—the girl was so unpredictable—when Daisy finally came back into the kitchen, waving an old envelope. “Here it is! I knew I still had it somewhere.”
“And what is it?”
“A computer printout from 1967. Please have a look. Is it still legible?”
Bernard opened the enveloped, which was brittle with age, and took out a few pages of thick, high quality paper that had aged well. “A list of names and addresses? What is this?”
“Is it still legible?”
“Oh, yes. I remember the computer printouts from the sixties. No paper was too expensive, the teleprinters worked with the best quality ink ribbons available. These pages still look superb!”
“Well, that is as it should be, as they will provide you with a window on the past. This list contains the names of all the men who ordered chloroform and a contraceptive pill on a regular basis from the summer of 1966, when Loretta and Susanna disappeared, to the summer of 1967, when I was abducted. It was given to me by a pharmacist named Michael Dobbs, who thought that if we checked these names at the General Register Office, we would end up with a much smaller list of unmarried men who ordered chloroform and the pill! The pervert was not likely to be married, and there would have been very few male customers ordering the pill who did not have a wife or a daughter… How about that?”
“Not bad, not bad at all. The only thing is, in my experience you would still have ended up with dozens of names…”
“Well, there was another idea I had at the time. You remember that the pervert went by the name of ‘Jumping Jack’ when he visited the communes? And that he was handing out pot and acid to the hippies like a sugar daddy at a children’s birthday party? I thought at the time that this fact could have made the man traceable, at least for the police, but that fool McCullough wouldn’t hear of involving you people…”
“Oh, but of course! The man is bound to have been busted while he was buying the stuff on the illegal drugs market. He would have been forced to show some ID. He would be listed in our records… even if he was busted only once! Now that, my dear Daisy, is good thinking! Yes. I’ll ask Collins to go through the records and compare them with the names on your Pharmacist’s list. People who ordered chloroform and the pill, and who were registered by the police for buying illegal drugs… That should narrow it down just nicely!”
“Well, don’t thank me, Bernard. You’re welcome to it.”
Bernard chuckled, moved his wheelchair over to Daisy and closed h