Read Online By the Time You Read This by Giles Blunt - Free Book Online Page B

Crimes Unit had sent her about twenty images; the package had been waiting for her when she came back from lunch. She had looked them over and was now wishing she hadn’t. The photographs provoked a reaction in her gut, as if she had received a solid blow to the belly. And then more complicated emotions set in—distress, almost panic, and yet at the same time an all but overwhelming hopelessness about the human species.
    The sights and sounds of the office—the click and slam of the photocopier, McLeod bellowing at Sergeant Flower, the tapping of keyboards and the chirping of phones—all diminished around her. Delorme felt a sob gathering in her chest, which she tamped down immediately. She had experienced something similar to this inner turmoil when reading certain news accounts: beheadings in Iraq, or the civil war in Africa where armed men raided villages, raping the women and chopping the hands off all the men.
    She knew the acts captured in the photographs did not compare to mass murder, but the effect on her spirit was the same: despair at the depths to which human nature could sink. Even in a place the size of Algonquin Bay you heard of such pictures, but until this moment Delorme had never seen anything like them. There had been the case of a social services administrator the previous year, a man apparently well loved by his family and friends, who had been charged with possession of child pornography. But it hadn’t been Delorme’s case, and she hadn’t seen the evidence. The man had killed himself while out on bail—apparently out of shame, even though he had been charged only with possession of the material, not with manufacturing or distributing.
    The pictures on her desk, Delorme realized, were actually crime scene photos. The criminal had taken them himself in the course of committing his crime; the creation of child pornography was unique in that respect. The girl looked to be as young as seven or eight in some of them, still with puppy fat around her neck and cheeks; in others she looked closer to thirteen. She had a sweet, open face, pale blond hair, shoulder length, and eyes almost unnaturally green, the colour emphasized in several pictures by the tears that flowed from them. There were pictures in a bedroom, pictures on a couch, pictures on a boat, in a tent, a hotel room. In one of the photos, a detail had been blurred out: a hat the little girl was wearing had been reduced to a blue and white smear.
    The man was careful not to show his face, and so he became a collection of disparate details. He was the hairy arm, the furry chest; he was the sticklike legs, the freckled shoulder, the butt just beginning to sag. His penis, closely featured in many shots, looked scorched and red, though whether from abuse or bad photography it was impossible to tell. Delorme, no prude and no hater of men, thought it the ugliest thing she had ever seen.
    It occurred to her that the man was not human; that he was mere animated flesh, a monster sprung from a madman’s lab. But the spirit-crushing truth, of course, was that he was human. He could be anybody, he could be someone Delorme knew. Not only was he human, he was also beloved by his victim; too many of the pictures showed her relaxed and grinning for it to be otherwise. He had to be either the girl’s father or someone very close to the family. That the little girl loved him, Delorme had no doubt, and it made her heart ache.
    Toronto had sent two additional envelopes. The first contained exact copies of the photographs, but the girl and her abuser had been digitally removed. Now they were just unexceptional scenes: an out-of-style sofa, what looked like a hotel bed, the interior of a tent, a backyard with a grubby plastic playhouse—settings of no interest unless you knew what had transpired in them.
    The third envelope contained just one picture, that of the girl wearing the hat, now enlarged into a close-up. The hat was a woollen toque, blue and white, no