The photos weren’t all that pornographic. What made the images tragic was that the girl in them was just that — a girl of fourteen and a young fourteen at that — with her skinny little child’s body only just beginning to imagine itself as a woman. Soft porn, hard porn — what’s the defining line? She was a child rehearsing the gyrations of sex and seduction techniques gleaned from music videos and girlie magazines sold at corner dairies. I certainly didn’t view the images as sexy, though no doubt paedophiles would. I felt world-weary as I looked at the photos. It seemed to me Sunny’s attempts at sexy were more a poignant parody of sexuality than the real thing. In one photo she mimed masturbation. In another she had pulled her skirt up to her waist to reveal her arse to the mirror. It was all to the mirror. All young girls are narcissists. When they’re not loathing their bodies they’re adoring them. In the privacy of the room, her relationship with the mirror was everything as she attempted to see herself as men would see her: sexy, provocative and inviting. Her performances should never have been photographed by anyone. But what made the whole thing frightening and truly ghastly was that these very personal moments had been captured by her father. The routines were private, for her eyes only. People talk about feeling dirty when they view pornography, but I didn’t feel dirty. I just felt immensely sad that these very innocent adolescent moments had been so cruelly taken from her. By her father. They belonged to her and no one else. Sunny had been dispossessed. One by one I deleted them. When I had finished and they were all gone, I would empty the cache.
A thought occurred to me and I hesitated before deleting the last image. I right-clicked on it and checked the shot information. It had been downloaded on Tuesday 27 November 2012. That was the day I had talked to Sunny at the gym. I cleared the shot information from the screen and forced myself to study the photo forensically; Sunny was wearing the T-shirt I had balked at. The one with ‘eat me’ written over her crotch. I checked what time the photo had been taken: eight o’clock. That was about an hour and half after I had left the gym. My knee stung as a reminder. Justin had attacked me when I was running in the park. If the time matched, he couldn’t have taken the photos. My mind raced. Justin’s claims of innocence had sounded convincing but I hadn’t paid them much heed. But if these photos were taken and downloaded at the time Justin was attacking me in the park — I needed to check that my memory of the time was accurate. But how to pinpoint it? And then I remembered. Aaron Fanshaw had phoned me minutes after my encounter with Justin as I had limped ignominiously through the park to Richmond Road. My phone was recharging in the bedroom, still attached by its umbilicus to the powerpoint. I had to squat down on the floor to reach it. Carefully, I checked the recent calls and there it was; the call from Fanshaw: 8.48 p.m. Tuesday 27 November 2012. I sat back on my heels. Justin couldn’t have taken the photos, he was way too busy attacking me at the time. But Anton had been at the gym. He’d caught me behind the counter while I was checking out Justin’s flight to Wellington on the work computer. I pictured Anton’s eyes sliding towards Sunny.
Finally the pieces were falling into place. Still on the floor, I rang Arohata Prison and managed to convince the superintendent to let me talk to Vex. I waited impatiently for her to come to the phone. There was a lot of clattering and crashing and echoing sounds at the prison end and a fair bit of me muttering ‘come on, come on’ at my end but, eventually, Vex picked up the phone.
‘What do you want, Diane?’
‘I need to ask you a question.’
She didn’t answer, but she didn’t hang up the phone either. You take what you can get.
‘You told me that when Norma and Karen made up, Norma changed her will to make Karen the benefactor.’ I heard the door downstairs open and close. Sunny and Neo were back. The clatter of their footsteps on the stairs. I didn’t have much time.