The Truth-Teller's Lie

by Sophie Hannah

‘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.’

  ‘So you cooked up a whole story about an affair, room eleven every Thursday night, your friend ringing up and speaking to Mr Haworth’s wife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He consults his notes. ‘Do you have a friend and lodger called Yvon?’

  I hesitate. ‘Yes. Yvon Cotchin.’

  ‘So not everything you said yesterday was a lie. That’s at least one lie you’ve told today, then. What about the panic attack, going to his house? Meeting Mrs Haworth?’

  ‘That was all true,’ I tell him. ‘I did go there. That was what made me think I couldn’t handle it myself. So I came to you.’

  Waterhouse says, ‘Yesterday you gave me and Sergeant Zailer a photograph of you with Mr Haworth. How do you explain that?’

  I try not to let surprise and annoyance show on my face. I should have thought about this, and I haven’t. I completely forgot about the photo. Calmly, I say, ‘It was a fake.’

  ‘Really? How did you do it, exactly?’

  ‘I didn’t. I took a photograph of Robert Haworth, and a photograph of me, and a friend did the rest.’

  ‘Where did you get the one of Mr Haworth?’

  I sigh, as if this should be obvious. ‘I took it myself, in the service-station car park. On the twenty-fourth of March last year.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ says Waterhouse. ‘He didn’t see you, standing right in front of him? And how come you had a camera with you?’

  ‘I wasn’t standing right in front of him. I took the picture from a distance, on my digital camera. My friend enlarged it on a computer and zoomed in on his head and shoulders, to make it look like a close-up . . .’

  ‘What friend? Miss Cotchin again?’

  ‘No. I’m not going to give you his name. Sorry. And, to answer your other question, I always have a camera with me when I’m on my way to see a prospective client, as I was that day. I take photographs of their gardens, or thei
r walls, wherever it is they want the sundial. It helps me to work if I’ve got a picture of the location to refer to.’

  Waterhouse looks uncomfortable. I see a flicker of doubt in his eyes. ‘If the story you’re telling me now is true, then the way your mind works is very strange,’ he says. ‘If it isn’t, I can prove that you’re lying.’

  ‘Perhaps you ought to let me tell you what I came here to tell you. Once you’ve heard what happened to me, you’ll see how it might mess with anybody’s head. And if you still don’t believe me after I’ve told you what I went through, I’ll make sure never to say another word to you ever again, if you think I’d lie about something like that!’

  I know it doesn’t help to endear me to him that I am furious instead of weepy, but I am so used to anger. I’m good at it.

  Waterhouse says, ‘As soon as I take your statement, this becomes official. Do you understand?’

  A small spasm of panic shakes my heart. How will I begin? Once upon a time . . . But I am not confessing or revealing. I am lying through my teeth—that’s the way to look at it. The truth will only be there to serve the lie, which means I don’t have to feel the feelings.

  ‘I understand,’ I say. ‘Let’s make it official.’

  6

  4/4/06

  STATEMENT OF NAOMI JENKINS of 14 Argyll Square, Rawndesley. Occupation: self-employed, freelance sundial-maker. Age: 35 years.

  This statement is true to the best of my knowledge and belief, and I make it knowing that, if it is tendered in evidence, I shall be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated anything in it which I know to be false or do not believe to be true.

  Signature: Naomi Jenkins Date: April 4, 2006

  On the morning of Monday, March 30, 2003, I left my house at 0940 and went to collect some Hopton Wood stone that I needed for my work from a local stonemason, James Flowton of Crossfield Farm House, Hamblesford. Mr Flowton told me that the stone had not yet arrived from the quarry, so I left immediately and walked back up the track to the main road, Thornton Road, where I’d parked my car.