returned to Auckland on Friday night, which Fanshaw said he had thoroughly checked out, Justin was in the clear. One by one, I deleted the photos of Karen while I still could.
Staring into space, I thought about the bruising on Karen’s neck and remembered Smithy’s description of the previous small bleeds in the brain. Had she been caught up in something in prison? Something she was unable to escape from even after she was released? Prisons are pressure cookers for the worst of human nature, but they can also bring out the best sometimes, I reminded myself. One of the most moving and powerful shows I’d ever seen had been performed by inmates of Arohata Women’s Prison: a series of little one-act plays written and acted out by the prisoners based on the crimes they had committed. The vast majority were tragic domestic stories. Perhaps Karen knew something about an inmate; something that wasn’t safe for her to know once she was released. Or maybe she had failed to fulfil some promise, failed to follow through on something she was supposed to do once she was on the outside. Is this where the threat to Sunny came from? I could theorise forever, but what I needed was information. And painkillers. My glass was empty and my knee stiffening. Who could give me information? Karen’s ex-cellmate could, but I wasn’t keen to see Vex again. The last time I saw her was shortly after she was imprisoned. As part of a deal for a reduced sentence, Vex had agreed to provide details of how she had procured my sister’s murder. And she had agreed to talk to me — restorative justice, it’s called. It didn’t give me closure or allow me to move on. And it certainly didn’t restore Niki. Niki stayed all the way dead. I realised with a kind of guilt that I thought about her less often now. Her ghost had tired of haunting me.
The sound of a key in the lock interrupted my gloomy thoughts. Ned. I was grinning before the door fully opened. Interesting.
He admitted to being useless in an emergency but excellent help once the patient was in recovery mode. He eyed me up from head to foot and declared that, in his learned opinion, recovery was ‘without doubt the very mode I was in’. When he removed the bloody cloth from my knee we both flinched. The gash was raw and oozing.
‘Do you think it might be needing stitches?’ he asked. ‘Not that I’m offering. But I will go with you to the hospital. It won’t take long. We could get you stitched up and be back here in no time.’ The stress of seeing my injury had turned up the heat on his accent.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I insisted. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in A and E for a couple of hours while nurses assessed me, prodded me, then moved on to more serious complaints.
‘Alright then. But let me get you something nice and cold.’ He made a dismissive wave towards my knee. ‘And I’ll get something for the knee as well.’
He was, in fact, a surprisingly gentle and confident nurse, placing a towel-covered cushion under my knee and a wrapped packet of peas gently on top of the wound. ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ he said, casually wiping away an escaped dribble of ice from my thigh, ‘this is the same packet of peas I used for the injury to my eye.’ He flattened the peas between his hands before gently placing the packet back on my knee. ‘Shared intimacy with frozen peas takes our relationship to a whole new level, don’t you think?’ I didn’t think it was the legumes so much as the touch that threatened to do that.
‘I’m sorry about Karen,’ I said, only partly to call the physical intimacy to a halt. ‘No doubt you heard …’
He lowered himself onto the sofa, casually lifting my feet onto his lap to make room for himself. ‘I did, yes,’ he said, sobering. ‘The police came here actually, looking to inform next of kin. I gave them Justin’s address.’ I considered telling him it was me who had found Karen’s body but it seemed crass to mention it; besides, it would raise questions I didn’t want to answer. Ned absent-mindedly stroked my foot. ‘What a tragedy for little Sunny. It would have been a good thing for her to have met her mother,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think?’