Blind Angel of Wrath (The Blind Sleuth Mysteries 2)

1 Here and now

This is every father's worst nightmare—and it should be every daughter's, too!

You're a man... well, maybe you're only married to one, or you're his daughter.

But let us say that you're a man like me and that you know all you need to about the dark recesses of the male psyche. Start with the urge we have to spread our genes, the urge to conquer, to score, to accumulate copulations, that is deeply imprinted into us by our biology and is barely kept in check by the constraints of society... Then add the fundamental tendency we have to dehumanize the object of so much lust: we're perfectly capable of screwing a plastic doll with only air inside! We don't find it contradictory to constantly worship her whom we consistently disregard... Finally, let us not even talk about our tendency to derive pleasure from inflicting pain, at least in our most secret fantasies. We pretend to believe that such tendencies are extremely rare, but we only need to take a good look deep inside our own sick minds to conclude that they must—unfortunately—be only too common.

You have a daughter—or more than one. Lively, smart and pretty. The apple of your eye: what an angel! She has just turned fifteen or sixteen, with all the right curves in the right places, and they are really starting to show... She is no longer a little girl, not yet a woman, but almost. And she has become a real pain in the backside, lately. Constantly criticising, mocking your opinions, ignoring your advice: little Miss Obnoxious! But you're an understanding father. You have also been young: you've been there yourself, you don't take it personally. She has to go out and explore the world, of course: fall in love with some uncouth youth. Meanwhile, you're always a bit uneasy in your mind: how green she still is, how naïve, and how reckless. If only she would heed your warnings; if only she wouldn't dismiss all your concerns...

Then one day it happens. You know straight away that something is terribly wrong. Even though she has been difficult sometimes, your darling daughter would never disappear like that without saying a word. But that is exactly what has happened. She just didn't show up when you were expecting her, and you have no idea where she might be. So you and your wife start phoning around frantically: to her school, her friends' houses, the new boyfriend's place, the library and any other place where she could have gone...

After a couple of hours, of course, you go to the police. You tell them that your daughter has gone missing. But they are infuriatingly blasé, and very bad at hiding it. They've seen it all before. They ask, "When was it exactly that your daughter should have turned up?"

"Two hours ago!"

"Well, please come back when it's been twenty-four hours... But only if by then she hasn't made an appearance of her own accord, of course."

"Yes, but wait a minute! You do realise that time is of the essence in a case like this... I mean, shouldn't we start looking for her when the trail is still fresh? What if the rapist just strangles her after having had his way with her? I've brought some of her clothes with me—unwashed, of course. Don't you have dogs that are trained specially to follow the scent of missing people?"

"No, sir, you are mistaken, we don't have such dogs... Please just come back tomorrow."

The next day, after spending twenty-four hours biting your nails and going crazy with worry, there is still no sign of your precious little girl. But you have had ample time to imagine the worst in gory detail. You rush back to the police station and find that you are now back to square one. This time they do agree to take down the particulars of the case, but maddeningly, there is still no question of immediate action.

"No sir, we are putting your daughter's name down on the list of missing persons... What more can we do? If you'll just fill in your name and the date and add your signature... here. Today is the fifteenth of May 1966..."

"And how many names are there on this list of yours?"

"Well, let me see... thirty-two."

"And that's for the whole metropolitan area?"

"Nope. Just for this police station. You know, it's because of this whole 'hippie' thing that is going on right now... A lot of kids are leaving home and running away to these so-called 'communes' without so much as a by-your-leave... Is your daughter a 'hippie' by any chance, sir?"

Well, you tell yourself, lately she has been dressing up like a Gipsy queen, more and more, but that is just a kind of fashion statement... right? After all, she does put on her school uniform without complaining every morning: so there! My daughter is not a hippie.

A week later you go back to the police. "Listen, you were right, my daughter did abscond to a hippie commune with a new boyfriend we didn't know about. But the disturbing fact is: now she has disappeared from that commune as well!"

"Well-well-well," the policeman says, "so you've been doing some legwork on your own, huh? You'd better leave that to the professionals, you know... But don't worry, if you give me the address of this commune, I'll send a chap round to investigate."

A month goes by. No news from the police. Meanwhile you can't stop thinking; this is when the demons lurking in the deepest recesses of your brain—there where you had banished them—come back to haunt you relentlessly. You can only imagine too well what kind of unspeakable things some sick pervert could be inflicting on your daughter right now in some dark, private dungeon fitted out under an ordinary house right here in your own city, maybe only a few streets away from where you live. Sickening fragments of dialogue out of long forgotten porn magazines come up spontaneously to the fore of your feverish mind: "I'm going to make you beg for it, you little slut!" It drives you crazy!

So you go back to the police station. This time a different officer is on duty; a younger man; a young father himself; more sympathetic. He listens to your worries with true feeling; he understands; he commiserates. But there's not much he can do for you either. He tries to explain: the sheer range of the problem; so many kids disappearing at the moment; the limited resources of the police force... "It would be touch-and-go at the best of times, but at the moment it's pretty hopeless..." And that's when it transpires that in fact the police are just waiting for your daughter's corpse to turn up. "You see, that's when we will actually have something to go on..."