D for Daisy by Nick Aaron - HTML preview

Acknowledgements

Thanks to those early readers who managed to recognize the value of a rough diamond: Hanna van der Ven, Judith Ouwehand (who also modelled for the cover) and Christopher Wainwright. To Erja Krings in particular, whose brainwave about the title was most welcome. Special thanks to Alex Hammond for his very professional assessment of the MS.

Finally, many thanks to you, dear reader who just finished my book. If you really liked it (or loathed it!) I’d ap-preciate your customer review on Amazon.

Blind Angel of Wrath

1967 in Swinging London. The Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. At Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park the hippies staged sit-ins to legalise marijuana. And even though she was blind since birth, it did not escape Daisy Hayes’ attention that “The times they are a-changin’…”

But just as she reached middle age and the height of her powers as an artist, Daisy was visited by a ghost from her past. An accomplice in an old story of revenge appeared at the opening of her new sculpture exhibition and made demands she could not ignore.

The man who challenged her was a desperate father, who told Daisy that his fifteen-year-old daughter—a hippie girl—had disappeared without a trace a year earlier. The police was powerless, or indifferent, or both. “You must help me to find her, Daisy Hayes. And you know why I’m asking you? It’s because I happen to know that you’re a real killer…”

Daisy and Bernard

In the summer of 1989 the Iron Curtain was unravelling, and Daisy Hayes had just become a pensioner who liked to do her ironing while listening to the latest news on the radio.

The doorbell chimed. A police officer handed over a summons—printed in Braille. Daisy was being asked to testify about a baffling and gruesome murder, and had to follow the policeman at once. During the ride to New Scotland Yard, even before the first interview took place, the blind lady reflected that, though she knew nothing about this case, she would not be able to prove her innocence without revealing the two murders she actually had committed—many years ago.

In an original twist to the “good cop-bad cop” routine, the older police investigator in charge of this strange case seemed to be very much in love with the blind suspect, and encouraged her to come clean and find redemption at long last.