Shooting in the Dark

she’d been doing it all her life. ‘I’m fairly busy at the moment,’ she said. ‘Two men in the house as well as Echo doesn’t leave me a lot of time. But I’ll come when I can. It’s been a real treat.’
    ‘Maybe I could get to know Echo as well?’
    ‘Sure,’ said Janet, finishing the change of nappy. ‘D’you want to hold her?’
    Angeles held out her arms to receive the child. She sat on a high-backed kitchen chair at the table, and Echo gazed silently into her face.
    Angeles explored the child with her fingers. There was nothing obvious or intrusive about the act. It was almost surreptitious. Supporting Echo’s back with her left hand, she gave her a finger to clasp, at the same time stroking the chubby fist of the child with her thumb. When Echo released her finger she ran her hand the length of the tiny legs, unable to stop herself smiling at the wonder of them.
    She didn’t touch Echo’s face with her hands; she ran the palm of one hand over the top of Echo’s head, taking in the growth of soft downy hair and the still open fontanelle; then she brought the child up close to her face so that their cheeks touched. Echo’s nose and mouth briefly came into contact with Angeles’ cheek, and then she brought her back to her lap and gazed down at her as if she could see each tiny feature.
    Echo blew a note through her lips, something that might have come from a tuba, and Angeles picked it up and blew one back.
    ‘She likes you well enough,’ Janet said.
    Angeles laughed. ‘We play in the same band.’
    Janet returned Echo to her pram and Angeles held the door for them. ‘There’s mail on the floor,’ Janet said. ‘It’ll be for Sam. Put it on the side.’
    ‘Oh, dear.’
    ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘It isn’t for Sam. It’s for you.’
    ‘Me. But no one knows I’m here.’
    ‘It’s addressed to Miss Angeles Falco. But it’s not written, the letters have been cut out of a magazine and stuck on with Sellotape.’
    While Janet watched, a shudder ran down the other woman’s body. Angeles began trembling, first her hands, then her lips, and she tottered backwards up against the wall. She turned and took a step forward and to the side, her hands out in front of her. She turned again, and again, almost spinning, until she was so disoriented Janet thought she would fall over.
     

29
     
    One of JD’s many talents was as a drummer in a country rock group, and it was while practising his solo for ‘When I’m Drinking I am Nobody’s Friend’ that he began cogitating on Sam’s hypothesis about a mythological solution to the case. There were other mythical figures, apart from Samson, who were blind; Oedipus blinded himself before he went into exile. Athena blinded the young Tiresias by covering his eyes with her hands when he surprised her naked. Odysseus blinded the Cyclops, Polyphemus. The only blind heroine he could think of was Fortuna, the blind goddess of fate; though he remembered that the Little Mermaid was dumb.
    None of them really fit the bill. JD couldn’t make a connection between any of them and the case of Angeles Falco. And yet, he thought, there are none so blind as those who will not see.
    Watching Angeles and using her as a study for the blind character in his novel, JD had confirmed something that he had suspected for a long time. As a musician, and especially as a drummer, he had always known that sound is almost indistinguishable from touch. When he played his drums he could feel the vibrations through his feet, and the group’s violinist, Eddie Jones, had shown him how to tell a high note from a low one just by touching the instrument while it was sounding.
    What this meant, of course, was that, while blindness was a kind of absolute, deafness was not. There was another route, touch, which led into the world of sound, whereas the visual world, the world of light, was isolated among the senses.
    ‘Where are you going with this?’ Sam asked him. ‘This’s only gonna be useful if it can catch the killer.’
    ‘I don’t know yet,’ JD said. ‘It’s just an idea. The thing about a mythological solution doesn’t work.’
    ‘I knew that as soon as I thought it.’
    ‘So we have to find something else to work with. I think the fact that Angeles is blind could be a factor.’
    ‘Maybe,’ said Sam.
    ‘What d’you mean, “maybe”? You started this thing.’
    ‘I mean “maybe”, JD. I’m not discounting it. It seems likely at the