The Truth-Teller's Lie (8 page)

‘So you wouldn’t mind somewhere with no pool and no air conditioning? ’ said Charlie, suspicious of what appeared to be an easy solution. There had to be a catch.

‘I mind that it’s not sunny and I mind that it’s colder than it is in London.’ Olivia sat straight-backed on her bar stool, legs crossed. She looked elegant and disappointed, like a jilted spinster from one of those long, boring films Charlie hated, full of hats and sullied reputations. ‘But there’s nothing I can do about it, and I’m certainly not going to sit by an outdoor pool in the pissing rain.’ Her eyes lit up suddenly. ‘Was there anywhere with a nice indoor pool? And a spa? A spa’d be great! I fancy one of those dry floatation treatments.’

Charlie’s heart plummeted. Why couldn’t everything have been perfect, just this one time? Was that too much to ask? No one was more fun to be with than Olivia, if the conditions were right.

‘I didn’t look,’ she said. ‘But I think it’s unlikely, unless you want to spend a small fortune.’

‘I don’t care about money,’ Olivia was quick to say.

Charlie felt as if there was a coiled spring inside her, one she had to keep pushing down or else it’d leap up and destroy everything. ‘Well, unfortunately, I have to care about money. So unless you want me to look for two separate hotels . . .’

Olivia was less well off than Charlie. She was a freelance journalist and had a colossal mortgage on a flat in London’s Muswell Hill. Seven years ago she’d been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The operation to remove both ovaries and her womb had been immediate, and had saved her life. Ever since, she’d been throwing money around like the spoiled child of aristocrats. She drove a BMW Z5 and took taxis from one side of London to another as a matter of course. Getting the Tube was one of the many things she claimed to have given up forever, along with compromising, ironing and wrapping presents. Sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep, Charlie worried about her sister’s financial situation. It had to involve a lot of debt—an idea Charlie hated.

‘If we can’t do the hotel thing properly, I’d rather do something completely different,’ said Olivia, after mulling it over for a while.

‘Different?’ Charlie was surprised. Olivia had vetoed, quite unambiguously, any form of self-catering on the grounds that it was too much effort, even after Charlie had said she’d do any shopping and cooking that was required. As far as Charlie was concerned, making some toast in the morning and a salad at lunchtime was not hard work. Olivia ought to try doing Charlie’s job for a day or two.

‘Yes. Camping, or something.’

‘
Camping?
This from the woman who wouldn’t go to Glastonbury because the toilet paper isn’t folded into a point by a maid?’

‘Look, it’s not my preferred option. A nice hotel in Spain in June, in the heat, was what I wanted. If I can’t have that, I’d rather not have some sad mockery of my ideal. At least camping’s meant to be shit. You go there expecting to sleep on some mud, under some cloth, and eat packets of dried food . . .’

‘I’m sure you’d dissolve like the Wicked Witch of the West from
The Wizard of Oz
if you ever tried to go camping.’

‘What about Mum and Dad’s, then? We haven’t been there together for ages. Mum’d wait on us hand and foot. And they’re always asking me when I’m next coming, with just a trace of disinheritance in their voices.’

Charlie pulled a face. Her and Olivia’s parents had recently retired to Fenwick, a small village on the Northumberland coast, and developed an obsession with golf that was at odds with the game’s leisurely image. They behaved as if golf were their full-time job, one they might be fired from if they weren’t diligent enough. Olivia had been to their club with them once, and she’d reported to Charlie afterwards that Mum and Dad had been about as relaxed as drugs mules in front of airport customs officials.

Charlie didn’t think she had the stamina to cope with all three members of her immediate family at the same time. She could not reconcile the concept of parents with the concept of holiday. Still, it was ages since she’d last made the trip up north. Perhaps Olivia was right.

The barman turned up the volume of the music. It was still Rod Stewart, but a different song: ‘The First Cut Is the Deepest’. ‘I love this one,’ he said, winking at Charlie. ‘I’ve got a “Rod is God” T-shirt, me. I normally wear it, but I’m not wearing it today.’ He looked down at his chest, apparently bemused.

The combination of Rod Stewart and the tartan wallpaper gave Charlie an idea. ‘I know where we can go,’ she said. ‘How do you feel about flying to Scotland?’

‘I’ll fly anywhere that’s got a nice holiday to offer. But why Scotland?’

‘We’d be near enough to Mum and Dad to go to theirs for a lunch or two, but we wouldn’t have to stay with them. We could down our roast dinners and escape . . .’

‘To where?’ asked Olivia.

‘Someone at work gave me this card for a holiday chalet place . . .’

‘Oh, for God’s sake . . .’

‘No, listen. It sounded good.’

‘It’ll be self-catering.’ Olivia made a squeamish face.

‘The card said home-cooked meals are available if you want them.’

‘Three times a day? Breakfast, lunch and dinner?’

How was it possible to need a stiff drink even while you held one in your hand, even as you were throwing it down your neck in large gulps? Charlie lit another cigarette. ‘Why don’t I phone and ask? Honestly, Liv, it sounded really good. All beds super-king size, that sort of thing. Luxury chalets, the card said.’

Olivia laughed. ‘You’re a marketing man’s dream, you are. Everything calls itself “luxury” these days. Every flea-bitten B&B, every—’

‘I’m pretty sure it said spa facilities too,’ Charlie cut her off.

‘That’ll mean a derelict shed with a cold puddle in it. I doubt they offer dry-floatation treatments.’

‘You want to dry-float? Why don’t we go upstairs and I’ll hurl you off our balcony?’ Didn’t they say that all the best jokes had an undertone of seriousness?

‘You can’t blame me for being a bit cautious.’ Olivia looked Charlie up and down as if she’d just met her for the first time. ‘Why should I trust you when you’re quite plainly mad?’ She lowered her voice to a fierce whisper. ‘You made up a boyfriend!’

Charlie looked away, blew a smoke ring into the air. Why did she feel a compulsion to tell her sister everything she did, even knowing perfectly well the flak she’d get?

‘Did you give him a name?’ asked Olivia.

‘I don’t want to talk about it. Graham.’

‘
Graham?
Jesus!’

‘I’d had a bowl of Golden Grahams for breakfast that morning. I was too knackered to be imaginative.’

‘If I adopted the same approach, I’d be going out with apple-and-cinnamon Danish. Did Simon believe you?’

‘I don’t know. I think so. He didn’t seem very interested one way or the other.’

‘Does Graham have a surname? Semi-skimmed Milk, perhaps?’

Charlie shook her head, smiling half-heartedly. The ability to laugh at oneself was supposed to be a virtue. It was one Olivia expected Charlie to practise rather too often.

‘Nip it in the bud as soon as you get back,’ Olivia advised. ‘Tell Simon it’s over with Graham. Rejoin the world of the sane.’

Charlie wondered if Simon had said anything to Sellers and Gibbs. Or, God forbid, to Inspector Proust. Everybody in CID saw her as a romantic disaster area. They all knew how she felt about Simon, and that he’d rejected her. They knew she’d slept with more people in the past three years than most of them had in their lives.

Charlie was already attached to her lie, to the new status and dignity it afforded her. She wanted Simon to think she had a proper boyfriend. Not just another of her hopeless one-night stands—a relationship that might last. Like a grown-up.

She hadn’t told Olivia about Alice Fancourt and Simon. It depressed her too much. Why was Simon thinking about Alice suddenly, after nearly two years of no contact? What good could come of seeing her again now? Charlie had assumed he had forgotten about Alice, or was in the process of doing so. It wasn’t as if anything had even happened between them.

He’d told Charlie solemnly that he was planning to ring Alice, as if expecting her to remonstrate with him. He’d known she would care. When she’d dropped her non-existent Graham into the conversation a few days later, it had been obvious that Simon didn’t.

Olivia kept saying as much, as if Charlie were in danger of forgetting. ‘Simon doesn’t care if you’ve got a boyfriend or not. I don’t know why you think you can make him jealous. If he wanted you, he could have had you long ago.’

Was it possible for Simon to find out that she’d invented Graham? Charlie didn’t think she could stand that. ‘Do you want me to ring Silver Brae Charlets or not?’ she said wearily.

‘It cannae be worse than this dump.’ Olivia faked a Scottish accent. ‘Och, aye, lassie, why not?’

5

Tuesday, April 4

‘I WANT TO report a rape,’ I tell Detective Constable Waterhouse.

He frowns, looking at the sheet of paper in his hand as if it might tell him what to ask next. ‘Who was raped?’

‘I was.’

‘When?’

I doubt he’d be so brusque if he believed me.

‘Three years ago,’ I say. His eyes widen. Clearly, he was expecting a different answer. ‘The thirtieth of March 2003.’ I hope I won’t have to say the date again. DC Waterhouse stands by the door as if guarding it, makes no move to sit down.

The interview room we are in is not much bigger than my bathroom at home. The pale-blue walls are covered with posters about solvent abuse, domestic violence, benefit cheats and video piracy. I cannot believe anybody really cares about people making illegal copies of films and selling them, but I suppose the police have to deal with all crimes, whether they care about them or not. All the posters have the police logo in the bottom right-hand corner, which makes me wonder if there is a design department somewhere in this building, someone whose job it is to decide what colour background a poster about Social Security fraud ought to have.

Designing is my favourite part of what I do. My heart always sinks when a customer has too specific an idea of what they want. I prefer the ones who are happy to leave it to me. I love choosing the Latin motto, deciding what kind of stone to use, what colour paint, what furniture. Dial furniture is anything on a sundial that isn’t directly to do with time-telling, any ornamental touches.

I’ve hardly told you anything about my work, have I? You never mention yours, and I don’t want to give the impression that I think mine is more important. I once made the mistake of asking you why you chose to become a lorry driver. ‘You mean I should be doing something better,’ you said immediately. I couldn’t work out if you were offended, or if you were projecting your own feelings about your job on to me.

‘I don’t mean that at all,’ I said. I really didn’t. Once I thought about it, I could see all sorts of advantages to doing what you do. Being self-employed, for a start. Being able to listen to CDs or the radio all day. I started to think that perhaps our jobs weren’t so dissimilar after all. I suppose there must be some ingrained snobbery in me that made me assume all lorry drivers were stupid and coarse, men with pot bellies and crew cuts who become violent at the prospect of rising petrol prices.

‘I like to be on my own and I like driving.’ You shrugged; to you, the answer was simple and obvious. You added, ‘I’m not thick.’ As if I would ever have thought you were. You’re the most intelligent person I’ve ever met. I’m not talking about qualifications. I don’t know if you’ve got O levels and A levels; I suspect you haven’t. And you don’t show off in conversation like some clever people do—quite the opposite. I have to drag opinions out of you. You offer your views and preferences apologetically, as if reluctant to have any sort of impact. The only thing you’re expansive about is how much you love me. ‘I’m my own man,’ you said. ‘Just me and the lorry. It’s better than being a Commie.’ In all the time we’ve known one another, this is the only reference you’ve ever made to politics. I wanted to ask what you meant, but I didn’t because our time together was running out; it was nearly seven o’clock.

‘Why did you ask for me or Sergeant Zailer?’ says DC Waterhouse. ‘I assumed you wanted to talk about Robert Haworth.’

‘I do. Robert is the person who raped me.’ The lie slides off my tongue. I’m not nervous any more. My brazen streak has taken over. I have a crazy, powerful feeling that tells me I can write the rules from now on. Who’s going to stop me? Who has enough imagination to understand what my imagination is capable of?

I’m the person who does the things nobody else would do.

A horrible thought occurs to me. ‘Am I too late?’ I ask.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Can I still report it even though it happened so long ago?’

‘Robert Haworth raped you?’ Waterhouse makes no effort to hide his disbelief.

‘That’s right.’

‘The man you’re in love with, and who’s in love with you. The man you meet every week at the Rawndesley East Services Traveltel.’

‘I lied yesterday. I’m sorry.’

‘Everything you said was a lie? You and Mr Haworth aren’t in a relationship together?’

I know from reading rape websites that some women remain romantically or sexually involved with their rapists afterwards, but I could never pretend to be the sort of fucked-in-the-head fool who might do that. Which means there’s only one thing I can say. ‘Everything I told you yesterday was a lie, yes.’

Waterhouse doesn’t believe me. He probably thinks I’m too composed. I hate the way everybody expects you to emote in public. ‘Why tell such a lie?’ He says it in the way he might to a suspect.

‘I wasn’t sure I wanted to report the rape at first.’ I keep using it, the word I’ve avoided for three years. It gets easier with each repetition. ‘I wanted to scare him—Robert Haworth. I thought a visit from the police, with my name mentioned, would terrify the life out of him.’

Waterhouse stares at me in silence. He is waiting for me to crumble. ‘So why the change of plan?’ he asks eventually.

‘I realised all my other ideas were stupid. Taking the law into my own hands . . .’

‘The thirtieth of March 2003 was a long time ago. Why wait until yesterday?’

‘Three years is nothing. Ask anyone who’s been raped. I was in shock for a long time. I was in no fit state to make decisions.’ I answer each question quickly, like a robot, and accept my own congratulations for having had the sense not to put myself through this ordeal three years ago.

Reluctantly, Waterhouse pulls a chair out from under the table and sits down opposite me. ‘You were more convincing yesterday than you are now,’ he says. ‘Has Mr Haworth given you the brush-off, is that it? Is this your way of punishing him?’

‘No. I—’

‘Are you aware that falsely accusing someone of rape is a serious criminal offence?’ He keeps his eyes on his sheet of paper. It is covered in writing, the smallest handwriting I’ve ever seen. I can’t read any of it.

I am about to answer him, but I stop myself. Why should I let him fire question after question at me? He’s got into a rhythm now, like someone throwing a tennis ball at a wall. I’m entitled to more respect and sensitivity. I am lying about one detail only. If I removed you from my rape story and put in a man whose name I don’t know, a man whose face I still see clearly in body-jolting, sweat-soaked nightmares, it would be a hundred percent true. Which means I deserve better treatment than this.

‘Yes, I’m aware,’ I tell him. ‘And you should be aware that I’m going to make a complaint about you if you don’t stop looking at me and talking to me like I’m shit on your shoe. I’m doing my best to be straight with you. I’ve apologised for lying yesterday and I’ve explained why I did it. I’m here to report a
more
serious crime than falsely accusing someone of rape, since we all know there’s a pecking order, and I think you should start concentrating on that instead of whatever prejudices you’ve got against me.’

He looks up. I can’t tell if he’s angry, daunted, startled.

‘Why don’t I make life easier for both of us?’ I say. ‘I can prove I’m telling the truth. There’s an organisation called Speak Out and Survive—they’ve got a website: speakoutandsurvive—all one word—dot org dot uk. On the page called “Survivors’ Stories”, there’s a letter I wrote, dated May the eighteenth 2003. The stories are numbered. Mine’s number seventy-two. I signed it only with my initials: N.J.’

Waterhouse is writing all this down. When he’s finished, he says, ‘Wait here,’ and leaves the room, letting the door bang shut. I am alone in the small blue cage.

In the silence, my head fills with your words. DC Waterhouse is nothing to me. He’s a stranger. I remember what you said about strangers, on the day we met, after you’d taken my side in an argument between me and a man named Bruce Doherty—another stranger, an idiot. ‘You don’t know him and he doesn’t know you,’ you said. ‘Therefore he can’t hurt you. It’s the people we’re closest to who can hurt us the most.’ You looked disturbed, as if you were trying to shut something out of your mind, something unwelcome. I didn’t know you well enough then to ask if you’d been badly hurt, and by whom. ‘Believe me, I know,’ you said. ‘The people you love are within hurting distance, close range. Strangers aren’t.’

Thinking of my own experience, I said vehemently, ‘You’re telling me a stranger can’t hurt me?’

‘If the pain isn’t personal, it isn’t as bad. It’s not about you, or the other person, or the relationship between the two of you. It’s more like a natural disaster, an earthquake or a flood. If I was drowning in a flood, I’d call it bad luck, but it wouldn’t be a betrayal. Chance and circumstance have no free will. They can’t betray you.’

Now, for the first time, I see what you mean. DC Waterhouse is behaving in the way he is because he has to, because it’s his job to doubt everything I tell him. It’s not about me. He doesn’t know me at all.

I wonder what you would say about strangers who are kind, who smile at me in the street and say, ‘Sorry, love,’ when they bump into me by accident. To anyone who’s experienced deliberate brutality, the slightest kind word comes as a shock forever after. I’m so pathetically grateful even for the small, meaningless kindnesses that cost people nothing; grovellingly thankful that someone thought me worth a smile or a ‘sorry’. I think it’s the shock of the contrast; I’m amazed that offhand generosity and offhand evil can exist in the same world and barely be aware of one another.

If the police find you safe and well, they will tell you what I’ve accused you of, all the sordid details. Will you believe me if I say I made it up? Will you understand that I only blackened your name in desperation, because I was so worried about you?

I wonder, not for the first time, if I ought to change all the specifics of the attack, so that the story I tell DC Waterhouse, if he ever lets me, is completely different from what really happened. I decide I can’t. I can only be confident if I have a bedrock of fact to support me. I haven’t slept properly for days. All my joints ache and my brain feels as if it’s been grated. I haven’t got the energy to invent rapes that never happened.

And no made-up story could be worse than my real one. If I can only persuade DC Waterhouse that I’m telling the truth, looking for you will leap straight to the top of his to-do list.

After about ten minutes the door opens. He edges back into the room, carrying several sheets of paper. Eyeing me warily, he asks, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

I am encouraged by this, but pretend to be annoyed. ‘I see. So now that I’ve proved myself, I get offered refreshments. Is there a sliding scale? Tea for rape, sparkling water for sexual assault, tap water for a mugging?’

His expression hardens. ‘I’ve read what you wrote. What you say you wrote.’

‘You don’t believe me?’ He’s more stubborn than I thought. I prepare to go into battle. I like a good fight, especially when I know I can win. ‘How would I know it was there if I hadn’t written it? You think women who haven’t been raped cruise rape websites for fun, and then when they find a story that happens to have their initials at the bottom—’

‘“My attacker was someone I had never seen before and have not seen since,”’ Waterhouse reads aloud from one of the pages in his hand. He’s printed out my letter. I baulk, uncomfortable with the idea that it’s in the room with us.

I speak quickly, before he can read me any more of my own words. ‘I didn’t know who he was at the time. I found out later. I saw him again. Like I told you, I bumped into him at Rawndesley East Services on Thursday the twenty-fourth of March last year.’

Waterhouse is shaking his head, flicking through his papers. ‘You didn’t say that,’ he contradicts me flatly. ‘You said you first met Mr Haworth on that date, but not where you met him.’

‘Well, that’s where I met him. At the service station. But it wasn’t the first time. The first time was when he raped me.’

‘Rawndesley East Services. At the Traveltel?’

I picture Waterhouse’s brain as a computer. Everything I tell him is a new piece of data to enter. ‘No. In the food-court bit. What I said about the Traveltel was a lie. I know there’s a Traveltel at Rawndesley East Services, and I wanted to keep my lie as close to the truth as possible.’

‘What about room eleven? The same room every time?’ He says this more quietly and sensitively than he’s said anything else. It’s a bad sign. He watches me carefully.

‘I made that up. I’ve never been inside the Traveltel or any of its rooms.’

Once he’s heard my story, he will be in no doubt that I’m telling the truth; he won’t bother to talk to staff at the Traveltel. And he knows I know this is something he could easily check. So why, he will think, would I tell such a risky lie?

‘So you met Mr Haworth, your rapist, for the second time on the twenty-fourth of March last year, in the food court of Rawndesley East Services?’

‘Yes. I saw him. He didn’t see me.’

Waterhouse leans back in his chair, throws his pen down on the desk. ‘It must have been a shock, seeing him like that.’

I say nothing.

‘How did you find out his name and where he lived?’

‘I followed him out to his van. It’s got his name and phone number on it. I got his address from the phone book.’ He can ask me anything. I will have my answer ready—a good, plausible answer—within seconds. Every time he draws my attention to a detail that he hopes will trip me up, I find a way to work it into my story. Everything can be reconciled. All I have to do is approach it methodically: this must be the case, and this must also be the case. What story will make that possible?

‘I can’t see it,’ says Waterhouse. ‘You know his name, you know where he lives. You said you were thinking about taking things into your own hands. Why didn’t you?’

‘Because if I’d ended up with a criminal record, that’d be another victory for him, wouldn’t it? I told you, I wanted the police to turn up at his house and give him the fright of his life. I didn’t want to have to . . . be face to face with him myself.’