The Truth-Teller's Lie

by Sophie Hannah

Your mouth is moving, as if you’re trying to say something else. Your face contorts.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ I ask. ‘Shall I call a nurse?’

  ‘Go away. Leave me alone,’ you whisper.

  I stare at the dry white ridges of skin on your lips. Shake my head. It’s impossible. There’s no way. You don’t know what you’re saying. ‘It’s me, Robert. Not Juliet.’

  ‘I know who you are. Leave me alone.’

  Something inside me is falling, falling. This cannot be happening. You love me. I know you do. ‘You love me,’ I say aloud. ‘And I love you.’ I’ve felt it once before, this tearing feeling, the sensation of everything good in the world being ripped away from me. I know from experience that it’s only a matter of seconds before it tears off completely and I’m adrift: every last link to safety and happiness has been destroyed and there is nothing to cling on to.

  ‘Get out,’ you say.

  ‘Why?’ I am too shocked and cold inside to cry. If you were in your right mind, you would not have said what you said, but I still have to ask for an explanation; what else can I do? I want to pound your chest with my fists and make you be your real self again. This is my worst nightmare. Before the police found you, when my imagination was full of dreaded tragic endings, I never once thought of this.

  ‘You know why,’ you say, looking straight at me. But I don’t. I am about to say this, to start pleading with you, when suddenly your back arches and you groan. Your eyes roll back and you begin to shake, as if there’s an earthquake inside your body. White foam spills out of your mouth. It’s a few seconds before I remember the emergency button and press it. I hear a faint, repetitive bleep coming from the corridor.

  ‘Naomi?’ Sergeant Zailer’s voice is behind me. She looks at my finger on the button, at the glass and spilled water on the floor. ‘Jesus Christ!’ She drags me by my arm out into the ward corridor. ‘What the fuck happened?’ she yells. My body feels limp and icy, like a sponge that’s been left in cold water. My mind searches frantically for an emergency exit, a way to undo the last few minutes of my life.

  I don’t care what you said. I would happily die if it meant you would live.

  The last thing I see before I am pushed out of the intensive care unit is three nurses running into your room.

  ‘I haven’t told you the truth,’ I confess to Sergeant Zailer. ‘I lied. I’m sorry.’ This morning I didn’t care a damn what she thought. She has no idea how much I need from her now, how the power balance has shifted. For as long as I was sure you loved me, I was all-powerful.

  We are nearly in Rawndesley. I don’t want to be dropped off at my house, alone. I can’t let Sergeant Zailer leave me there. I have to keep her talking. As she drives, I fight off vivid memory flashes—like movie stills—from what happened to me before, when I was kidnapped: the bed with acorn posts, the wooden table. The man. Your love for me was a padded layer that kept all that at bay, and now it’s been peeled away. My soul is mangled and exposed.

  ‘Lied?’ says Sergeant Zailer. I feel as if I might suffocate in her indifference.

  ‘My rape story was true, all of it. Except it wasn’t Robert. I don’t know who he was. I’m sorry for lying.’ Yvon was right. This is all my fault, everything bad that’s happened. I told a lie that blended the best thing in my life with the worst thing. Sacrilege. Casual vandalism, you would call it. And now I’m being punished.

  ‘I could and should charge you with obstruction,’ says Sergeant Zailer. ‘What about the panic attack at Robert’s window, last Monday, the terrible thing you claimed you saw but couldn’t remember? Was that a lie too?’

  Another bright flash, like a shutter being pulled back, and I can see your living room again. I am there, looking through the glass. I gasp, grabbing the seat, the dashboard. ‘Stop,’ I manage to say. ‘Please!’ I fumble with the catch that will release the door as if my life depends on it, like a person whose car is submerged in water. I can see that room, the glass cabinet. I am zooming in in my mind, speeding towards it. I have to get out.

  Sergeant Zailer pulls over by the kerb. I open the car door and take off my seat belt. ‘Put your head between your knees,’ she says. I feel better with the belt off. The tight feeling in my chest gradually subsides, and I gulp in as much air as I can. Sweat drips from my forehead on to my hands.

  ‘Where did you find him?’ I ask, panting. ‘Robert. Was he in the lounge? Tell me!’

  ‘He was in the bedroom, lying on the bed,’ said Sergeant Zailer. ‘We found nothing in the lounge.’

  What I saw—the unbearable thing—was in the glass cabinet. I know that now, but I’m scared to tell Sergeant Zailer. A specific detail like that might make her suggest we go there, and I can’t. I’d rather swallow poison than look through that window again.

  ‘What’s your first name?’ I ask, once I’ve got my breath back.

  She frowns, as if annoyed to be asked. ‘Charlotte,’ she says. ‘Why?’

  ‘Can I call you Charlotte?’

  ‘No. I hate the name, makes me sound like a Victorian aunt. I’m Charlie, and no, you can’t call me that either.’

  ‘Phone the hospital again. Please.’

  ‘Robert’s still alive. If he wasn’t, I’d have had a call.’

  I am too weak to argue. ‘Whatever I’ve said and done wrong, you’ve got to understand . . . I’m fighting for my life,’ I tell her. ‘That’s how it feels.’

  ‘Naomi, do you remember I left Robert’s room to make a phone call?’ Sergeant Zailer says gently.

  I nod.

  ‘DS Kombothekra from West Yorkshire CID showed Prue Kelvey and Sandy Freeguard a photograph of Robert earlier today. That’s what the call was about.’

  At first I can’t place any of the names. Then I remember. I close my eyes, relieved. I hadn’t even realised I’d been waiting for this news. ‘Good,’ I say. ‘So you no longer suspect Robert of being a serial rapist.’ The stupid, awful thing I did has been undone and we can all forget it ever happened.

  ‘Prue Kelvey said she wasn’t sure . . .’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’

  ‘She didn’t make a positive identification, but she said he was the right type, it might have been him.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. She can’t remember. She probably thought it must be Robert, if a cop was showing her his photo, and she didn’t want to ruin things by pointing out that it wasn’t him!’

  ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ says Sergeant Zailer. ‘It’s not her response I’m interested in. We’ve got a DNA profile to compare with Robert’s in her case, so if he didn’t do it, that’ll soon prove it . . .’

  ‘What do you mean, if he didn’t do it? You know I made up that story. Don’t you? The part about Robert.’

  She nods. ‘I think so. But when a person lies as easily as you did, it’s hard to know what to believe. Would you recognise your assailant’s face, do you think, after all this time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re more confident than Prue Kelvey. Her response to the photograph wasn’t very useful. It’s Sandy Freeguard’s response I’m more interested in. She said Robert definitely wasn’t the man that raped her—’

  ‘Thank goodness one of them’s got a memory!’

  ‘—but she also said she knew him. “That’s Robert Haworth,” she said.’

  My mind tilts. Once again, everything familiar starts to spin, to rearrange itself into a new, random pattern. Nothing is where I think it is, or what I think it is. ‘Tell me,’ I say.

  ‘Three months after she was raped, she met Robert. They started going out together.’

  ‘Where did they meet? That’s bollocks. No woman who’s been through anything like what I went through would get herself a new boyfriend so quickly.’

  ‘Sandy Freeguard did. They met in Huddersfield town centre. Her car collided with his.’

  ‘You mean his lorry?’ I am determined to fend off each new fact as it approaches. There must be some mistake. I don’t know
this DS Kombothekra, so why should I trust what he says?

  ‘No, Robert was in his car, a Volvo. The accident was Freeguard’s fault, she says, and she was upset about it. Robert was very understanding, apparently, and they ended up going for coffee. That was how the relationship started.’

  ‘But . . . no! It’s too much of a coincidence!’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ Sergeant Zailer says caustically. ‘I don’t understand it either. You and Sandy Freeguard were attacked in the same way, probably by the same man, and you both went on to have relationships with Robert Haworth. How can that be?’

  Her confusion scares me more than my own. ‘When?’ I ask. ‘When did this Sandy woman go out with Robert?’

  ‘November 2004. She was raped in the August of the same year.’

  I have heard the word ‘rape’ so many times in the past week. I no longer dread hearing it. It has lost its power. ‘I met Robert in March 2005. When did they split up?’ I have a horrible premonition of what Sergeant Zailer will say next. ‘Oh, God. They didn’t split up, did they?’

  ‘Yeah, they did. Just before Christmas 2004. You thought Robert was two-timing you with her?’

  ‘No. Only because—’

  ‘Would you care? He was two-timing you with his wife, wasn’t he? It wasn’t as if you thought he was faithful to you.’

  ‘It’s totally different. I knew about Juliet. Of course I’d care if I found out Robert had been lying to me all the time we were together, hiding a secret girlfriend.’ I take a few deep breaths. ‘Why did they split up, Robert and this Sandy Freeguard? Did she say?’

  ‘DS Kombothekra asked her about the relationship in detail, including the break-up. Apparently Robert was the model boyfriend—very attentive and keen—until one day he told her it was all over, completely out of the blue. He just switched off, she said. Came over all dutiful and husbandly, said he didn’t feel he was being fair to his wife and that was it. So . . .’ She shrugged.

  ‘So what?’ I say angrily. ‘So you’re trying to make out he’s unreliable, the sort of person who’d blow hot one minute and cold the next? No way. He’s loved me for a year. There’s no way he’d turn against me.’

  ‘Sandy Freeguard couldn’t understand it either,’ Sergeant Zailer says patiently. ‘Naomi, loads of men—especially married ones— declare undying love right up until the point when they want nothing more to do with you.’

  ‘Robert’s not like other men, and his motives are nothing like theirs. You wouldn’t understand unless you knew him.’

  Sergeant Zailer starts the car engine. ‘Close your door,’ she says. ‘I’ve got to get back. We’re not going to work this out just sitting here.’ She lights a cigarette as she drives. I wish I smoked. ‘Sandy Freeguard and Robert never had sex. I assume that’s not true of you and Robert.’

  ‘No. We had sex every Thursday, for three hours. I’m not surprised she didn’t want to, though, if it was only three months after.’

  ‘She wanted to. It was Robert who insisted on waiting, said she couldn’t possibly be ready. She told him about what had happened to her.’

  Wetness clouds my eyes. ‘That sounds like him,’ I say. ‘He’s really thoughtful.’

  ‘Sandy Freeguard found it irritating. She wanted to be treated normally, and he kept telling her to take it slowly, not to do too much too soon. She said he discouraged her from setting up a support group and training as a counsellor and all the positive things she wanted to do. He said she wasn’t ready and she wouldn’t be able to cope if she took on too much.’

  ‘He was probably right.’ I defend you even though you’ve just smashed my heart up. One day we’ll resolve the misunderstanding and you’ll take back what you said today. Why were you in Huddersfield, in your car instead of your lorry? Why weren’t you working that day?

  Sergeant Zailer is shaking her head. ‘From what Sam Kombothekra says, Freeguard’s a bit of a dynamo. She copes by putting herself and her experiences out there and trying to turn them into something positive, for herself and for others. He says she’s a real inspiration.’

  ‘Well, bully for her,’ I say pettily. I can’t help it. How does she expect me to react to hearing that I’ve been beaten hands down in the Best Rape Victim Contest?

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ She sighs. ‘Sandy Freeguard told Kombothekra that she didn’t believe Robert’s reason for ending the relationship. Let’s face it, if he cared that much about saving his marriage he wouldn’t have started an affair with you only a few months later, would he? I’m inclined to agree with Freeguard: he couldn’t handle knowing about the rape, so in the end he left her. That’d explain why he didn’t want to have sex, too.’

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to say! Robert would never be like that.’

  ‘Are you sure? Maybe you feared he would be, and that’s why you didn’t tell him about what happened to you.’

  ‘I didn’t tell anyone.’

  ‘And yet Juliet Haworth knows what happened to you. Who told her, if not Robert?’

  ‘You’re twisting everything to fit in with—’

  ‘I’m trying to,’ she agrees. ‘But no matter how hard I try, I can’t get my head round this one. You say Robert didn’t rape you, and, for what it’s worth, I believe you. But I don’t believe in coincidences.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ I say quietly.

  She grimaces. ‘Then, whether you like it or not—whether I like it or not—we have to face facts. Robert Haworth’s connected to these rapes somehow.’

  18

  4/7/06

  ‘HE’S UNCONSCIOUS AGAIN?’ Unreasonably, Sellers felt slighted, as if Robert Haworth might have done it to spite them.

  ‘An epileptic fit, a rebleed, swollen brain tonsils. And he’s been having small but regular epileptic fits ever since. It’s not looking good.’ Gibbs shook his jacket off his shoulders and took a sip of his pint. He and Sellers were in the Brown Cow, not the nearest pub to work, but the only one in Spilling that served seven different kinds of Timothy Taylor beer. The walls and ceiling were covered in dark wood panelling, and there was a no-smoking room to the left of the front door, with a framed portrait of the eponymous brown cow on the wall. No bobby or detective would risk sitting in there, even the ones who didn’t smoke, in case someone saw them. The sarge, who did, thought it wasn’t fair that the non-smokers got the picture of the cow in their room, the pub’s only painting. ‘All we get is the crappy menu boards,’ she often complained. A sign to the right of the bar warned customers that, from Monday 17 April, the entire pub would be a smoke-free zone.

  ‘Status epilepticus,’ said Gibbs, in a hard, bitter voice. ‘Just our fucking luck. What did you order me?’ He took another large gulp of his pint, and belched.

  ‘Steak pie and chips. I haven’t ordered for Waterhouse.’

  ‘He’ll have a pint, no food. He’s got some fucking weird hang-up about eating in front of other people. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.’

  When all was well, Sellers and Gibbs sometimes discussed Simon Waterhouse’s peculiarities, but Sellers was reluctant to do so with Gibbs in this mood.

  ‘I bet you’re having chicken with something fancy stuffed up its arse, fruit or some shite like that.’

  ‘Where’s the sarge?’ Sellers ignored the sneery tone. In fact, he had ordered a perfectly respectable haddock and chips.

  ‘At the hospital, brushing up on boffin jargon.’ Everything Gibbs said sounded like an excellent way to end a conversation.

  Sellers tried again. ‘I see we’ve got some extra bodies drafted in to help with the donkey work. How did Proust wangle that?’

  ‘Waste of time. Half of them are on to the theatres, half are ploughing through rape porn sites on the Net, but so far, nothing. That cunt Juliet Haworth’s still not talking, and we can’t do a fucking thing about that, can we?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning, she smashed her husband’s head in with a rock. She’s made it pretty clear our words
will never hurt her, the cocky bitch. Time for some sticks and stones.’

  ‘You want to start beating up women now? Look good on your CV, that will.’

  ‘If it stops innocent women getting pulled off the street and raped . . .’

  ‘How can that be down to Juliet Haworth?’

  Gibbs shrugged. ‘She knows something. She knew what had happened to Naomi Jenkins, didn’t she? Know what I reckon? Haworth’s our rapist, whatever Jenkins is saying now. And his cunt of a wife helped him.’

  So why are you looking at me like it’s my fault? Sellers wondered if he was getting paranoid in his old age.

  ‘I spoke to the people at SRISA about Tanya from Cardiff,’ said Gibbs. ‘They had her details.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Killed herself. Overdose.’

  ‘Shit. When?’

  ‘Last year. Want some more good news? Speak Out and Survive were a wash-out. They had nothing. New computers, very little paperwork. I’ve got someone on it, but I doubt we’ll be talking to survivor thirty-one any time soon.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yeah. It is, really. Still, don’t let it get you down.’ Gibbs faked a sickly smile. ‘You’re off away with Suki soon, aren’t you? Sun, fun and sex. You won’t want to come back.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ Sellers murmured, ignoring the snide delivery. He was already getting worried about what he’d do when the holiday was over, when he no longer had it to look forward to. He was of the view that it was the anticipation of the sex more than the sex itself that made adultery and infidelity well worth the risk.

  ‘If Stacey finds out where you are, you won’t have the option of coming back, even if you want to. Maybe I could invite Suki to my wedding. That’d be a nice surprise for Stacey, wouldn’t it?’

  It took a lot to make Sellers lose his temper, but Gibbs had been putting in the hours recently. ‘What the fuck’s your problem? Are you jealous, is that it? You’ve got your honeymoon coming up. Where is it you’re going? Seychelles?’

  ‘Tunisia. My honeymoon. Of course—an age-old tradition. If you get married, you have a honeymoon.’