D for Daisy (The Blind Sleuth Mysteries 1)

D for Daisy Part 2: 1943

In the train on her way back to London, Daisy felt sad, of course, and reflecting back on a strange day, she had the feeling that ages had gone by since she had been revising anatomy with her friends that morning. It seemed an eternity since the major had come knocking at her door to tell her that Ralph was dead. All this still didn't seem real.

Well, you certainly needed to bring it back to the forefront of your mind. Feeling Ralph's corpse under her fingertips had been real enough, all the features had been familiar under her touch, but so cold, so gaunt, so lifeless. Ralph had always loved it when she explored his face or his body. When they were lying in each other's arms, she liked to fondle him for what seemed to be hours on end. He would undergo her caresses quite solemnly, with utmost patience, but sometimes he couldn't help himself and he would burst out into giggles like a little boy. In the end he would seize her hand and kiss her palm or her fingertips. It had always been the most intimate thing between them.

As a child, Daisy had been taught not to touch people or their possessions. When you visited your dear old Aunt Agatha, it just wouldn't do to touch her dear old face and all the interesting knickknacks in her parlour. Or her china. "Daisy, manners, dear." And when you burned your fingers on her hot teapot, your mother would grumble "Serves you right for always touching everything." And Mummy had never stopped to think that she was depriving her blind little girl of one of her only means of exploring the world. Thank God in the end her parents sent her to a new school for the blind, where people had much more enlightened ideas... So Ralph's corpse under her fingertips had been very real indeed.

Then there had been the fact that she couldn't find any wounds, even with that nice attendant's help. That was also real. It had been quite a shock. Daisy knew all about the German flak and the night fighters and the deadly wounds inflicted by shrapnel and stray bullets. Ralph had always been brutal in his descriptions of the dangers involved in his work. He had spared her no detail. She knew from other wives and girlfriends of RAF men, that other husbands and boyfriends would avoid such subjects or gloss them over in order to spare the sensitivities of their womenfolk. With Ralph no such nonsense. At the beginning of their relationship he had said to her, "I have no idea of what a blind girl needs, so I want you to be absolutely ruthless, even brutal, in telling me about it." Then, when he had started flying on a bomber, he had applied the same principle to the discussion of his own plight.

So, when she heard that his body had been carried off the plane, Daisy had known straight away that this could mean only one thing: that Ralph had been killed by shrapnel from flak or by a stray bullet. Then, when she couldn't find any wounds, she had understood at once that this did not make any sense. The first question that came to her mind had been, "What has killed him? I need to get an autopsy done in order to ascertain what killed my dear Ralph." It was only natural. Or was she just grasping at straws as the morgue official had said?

Now, the next step had occurred in the major's office at the RAF station that second time, when she had returned to the base. All of a sudden she had been talking of murder. She had just blurted it out without thinking, and she had no idea where such a notion had come from. But was it real, though? Such ideas that just pop up in your head out of nowhere have an uncanny tendency to feel very real indeed, and completely dreamlike at the same time. For the major it had been the last straw, poor man. And in one respect he had been right: none of this was going to bring Ralph back.

But at least this notion of murder had been useful in her dealings with that very rude and stubborn Chief Inspector at the police station. Even though she hadn't been able to obtain the autopsy she wanted, filing an accusation of murder had been one step in the right direction. Her discovery at the morgue was now on record, as it were. And there was one good thing to be said about the Chief Inspector: he had demanded that she find her own way to the front desk with her cane. Nobody ever did that, but more people should. It is very nice for a blind person to be told, "You can manage on your own."