Fifty-nine-year-old Trish Vickers lost her eyesight to diabetes seven years ago.
With an imagination that "runs riot," Vickers, who lives in Charmouth in the UK, began writing a book in long hand, the BBC reports. Her son Simon would come over once a week to read her work back to her. But during one visit last year, Simon realized that 26 pages his mother thought she'd written were totally blank. The ink had run out.
Desperate to recover any part of the manuscript, the duo called up the Dorset police, the Dorset Echo reports.
"We rang them and asked to speak to their fingerprint section. They said if there was anything they could do they would be happy to help," Vickers told the publication. "I was gobsmacked and so happy," she said.
Sure enough, a few weeks later, they presented the manuscript back to her. Working during their spare time, staff at the police station had used a combination of bright lights to reveal the indentations made by the pen.
"Fortunately apart from one line we managed to retrieve the whole lot," Kerry Savage, from the Dorset police, told the BBC.
"It was nice to do something good for somebody and it was nice to read the book as well," he said.
The book, called Grannifer's Legacy, is about a girl whose life falls apart when she loses her job, her boyfriend and her great-grandmother.
"Everybody who has read the book so far seems to like it and the police also said they enjoyed the bit they read and can’t wait for the rest," Vickers told the Sun.