The Truth-Teller's Lie Read online

  After days of blind, flailing panic, I feel as if I’ve scrambled up on to a small ledge. It’s a relief to be able to rest on it for a while, knowing that while I am passive, others are active.

  I continue to apply gold leaf with my badger-hair brush. The motto on the dial I’m working on at the moment is ‘Better today than not at all’. It’s a belated silver-wedding-anniversary present from a forgetful husband to his wife; he told me he hopes the gesture is grand enough to get him out of her bad books. He wanted a standing sculpture, for a particular spot in their back garden. I’m making him a pillar out of Hornton stone, with the dial part on its flat top surface.

  I hear the door open behind me, feel the wind on my back, through my jumper.

  ‘Naomi, two detectives are here to see you.’ There is anxiety in Yvon’s voice, as well as an eagerness to appear natural and relaxed.

  I turn. A bulky man in a grey suit is smiling at me. It’s a dubious sort of smile, as if he expects not to be wearing it for much longer. He has a fat stomach, straw-coloured hair that is spiky with gel on top, and a shaving rash. His colleague, short, dark and thin with small eyes and a low forehead, slips in between the fat man and Yvon, and begins to prowl around my workshop, uninvited. He picks up my bandsaw, looks at it and puts it down again, then does the same with my fretsaw.

  ‘Get your hands off my things,’ I say. ‘Who are you? Where’s DC Waterhouse?’

  ‘I’m DC Sellers,’ says the fat one. He is holding up a card in a plastic wallet. ‘This is DC Gibbs.’ I don’t bother to check the ID. They’re obviously police. They have a quality in common with Waterhouse and Sergeant Zailer, one that’s hard to define. Inflexibility of manner, perhaps. Behaving as if there are charts and tables in their heads. A thin veneer of politeness masking a knee-jerk dismissiveness. They trust each other, but nobody else.

  ‘We need to have a look round your house,’ says DC Sellers. ‘And the garden and any outbuildings. Which includes this shed. We’ll cause as little disruption as we can.’

  I smile. So the talking is over and there is going to be action. Good. ‘Don’t you need a search warrant?’ I say, though I have no intention of sending them away.

  ‘If we believe a missing person to be at risk, we’re entitled to search the premises,’ says DC Gibbs stiffly.

  ‘Are you looking for Robert Haworth? He isn’t here, but search all you please.’ Are they looking for you as a criminal or as a victim, I wonder. Perhaps both. I told DC Waterhouse that I’d considered taking the law into my own hands.

  ‘We might need to take some things away with us,’ says Sellers, smiling again now that he sees I’m not going to put up a fight. ‘Your computer. How long have you had it?’

  ‘Not long,’ I say. ‘A year or thereabouts.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ says Yvon. ‘I live here too, and work here. If you’re going to search the house, can you leave my office exactly as you found it?’

  ‘What work do you do?’ asks Sellers.

  ‘I’m a website designer.’

  ‘We’ll need to take your computer as well. How long have you had it?’

  ‘How long have you lived here?’ says Gibbs, before Yvon’s had a chance to answer the last question.

  ‘Eighteen months,’ she says shakily. ‘Look, you can’t take my computer, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m afraid we can.’ Gibbs smiles for the first time, a tight, gloating grin. He walks over to the windowsill, picks up a brass pocket sundial and tugs at the string. It’s a sturdy little thing, which I can see disappoints him. He hoped he might break it. Sellers clears his throat, and I wonder if it’s a reprimand.

  ‘How will I work?’ asks Yvon. ‘When will I get it back?’

  ‘We’ll get it back to you as quickly as we can,’ says Sellers. ‘Sorry about the inconvenience. It’s just routine, we have to do it.’ She looks slightly reassured. ‘Right, then.’ He turns back to me. ‘We’ll start in the house.’

  ‘Where’s DC Waterhouse?’ I ask again. The answer comes to me as I’m speaking. ‘He’s at Robert’s house, isn’t he?’

  You are there somewhere, at 3 Chapel Lane. I know you are. I think of the panic attack I had outside your window, collapsing on the grass. Every blade was a cold brand on my skin, freezing its length into my flesh. My breath becomes jerky and I force myself to push the memory away before it overpowers me.

  ‘Robert?’ Sellers looks puzzled. ‘You’ve accused this man of abducting and raping you. How come you’re on first-name terms with him?’

  Yvon’s face has turned pale. I avoid her eye. Unless Sellers and Gibbs are completely incompetent, they will find several books about rape and its aftermath in the bottom drawer of my bedside cabinet, as well as a rape alarm and an aerosol spray. I’ve got the accessories to back up my story, all the depressing paraphernalia of victimhood, hidden under a folded pillowcase.

  ‘A woman can call her rapist whatever she wants,’ I say angrily.

  DC Gibbs leaves while I am still speaking, letting the door bang shut behind him. Sellers acknowledges my response with a very slight shift of his features. Then he too turns to go. I watch him as he rejoins his more malignant colleague outside on the path. The two of them set off towards the house.

  Yvon doesn’t follow them, even though I turn my back on her and pick up my brush. My back is stiff with tension, hard and flat, to repel what I know she is about to say.

  ‘I’m sorry about your computer,’ I mutter. ‘I’m sure they won’t keep it for long.’

  ‘Robert abducted you and raped you?’ she says in a tight voice.

  ‘Of course he didn’t. Close the door.’

  She stands still, shaking her head.

  In the end I get up and close it myself. ‘I told a lie—a big one—to make the police think Robert’s dangerous and needs to be found urgently.’

  Yvon stares at me, aghast.

  ‘What choice did I have?’ I say. ‘The police were doing sod all. I want to know what’s happened to Robert. I know something has. I needed a way of making them look for him.’

  ‘That’s why you wanted me to take you to the police station yesterday.’ Her voice is dull, toneless. ‘What was the story? What exactly did you tell them?’

  ‘I’m not going there, okay?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because . . . I’ve just told you, it was a lie, it was rubbish. Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘You told the police that Robert—the man who according to you is your soul mate, the man you want to marry and spend the rest of your life with—you told the police he abducted you and raped you?’ She is trying to shock me with the stark fact of what I’ve done. It won’t work. I got over my shock a while ago. Now my lie, the extreme step I’ve taken, is simply part of my life like everything else: my love for you, my real ordeal at the hands of a man whose name I don’t know, this stone sundial in front of me with a painted-on smiling sun at its centre.

  ‘I’ve told you why,’ I insist. ‘The police didn’t care about finding Robert when he was just my missing married boyfriend. I wanted to put a rocket under their arses, and it worked.’ I gesture in the direction of the house. ‘They’re here, looking.’

  ‘They must think you’re insane. They’re probably wondering if you’ve stabbed him or something.’

  ‘I don’t care what they think, as long as they look for him as hard as they can.’

  ‘They know you’re lying.’ Yvon looks tearful. Her voice is laced with panic. ‘If they don’t already, they’ll find out.’ Deep down, she is still an obedient boarding-school girl. She is conventional in the way that almost everybody is. I realise that more people would agree with her about this than with me, which is a strange thought.

  I say nothing. The police can’t prove I wasn’t abducted and raped, however hard they try, and they can’t prove it wasn’t you who did it until they find you.

  Should I tell Yvon the truth about what happened to me? Yesterday I proved to mys
elf that I could do it, tell the story. It wasn’t as bad as I’ve spent three years imagining it would be. On the way home from the police station, I felt as if I’d clawed back a bit of dignity from the men who’d stolen it from me. I was no longer too frightened to speak.

  No one will ever understand this—not even you, Robert—but it helps me to think that I told the story, eventually, in the way I did: as part of a deliberate strategy to manipulate the police. Not in good faith, not as a good girl humiliated. Maybe it even made it easier that Detective Constable Waterhouse spoke to me as if I were a criminal. Technically, I probably am one, now that I’ve made a false statement. I am no longer the prey of the man who attacked me. I am his equal; we are both law-breakers.

  ‘You can’t love Robert,’ says Yvon in a choked voice. ‘If you love him, how can you tell such an awful lie about him? He’ll hate you.’

  ‘I’ll withdraw the accusation as soon as they’ve found him. I might get into trouble for lying to the police, but I don’t care about that. Nothing bad can happen to Robert if I admit I was lying.’

  ‘Are you sure? Can’t the police pursue something like this irrespective of what you say? They’ll still have a record of whatever story you told them yesterday, won’t they? They can use that!’

  ‘Yvon, there’s no way that’d happen,’ I say patiently, though my brain is starting to feel frayed at the edges. ‘It’s hard enough to get a conviction in a rape case at the best of times, even if the victim’s a credible witness. There’s no way the cops’ll pursue this once Robert’s been found and I’ve changed my story for the second time. It’d be laughed out of court.’

  ‘You don’t know that! What do you know about how the police and court systems work? Nothing!’

  ‘Look, I’ve given them a date, okay?’ I pause, unable to say March the thirtieth 2003 out loud. ‘Since Robert didn’t abduct me on that date, he’ll be able to prove he didn’t. He’ll have been working—he works every day. He’ll have an alibi, someone who saw him loading up or who took a delivery from him, someone who saw him at a service station or in a lorry park. Or he’ll have been with Juliet.’ I’ve been through this in my head dozens of times. ‘There’s no risk to Robert.’

  ‘Bugger Robert!’ Yvon’s anxiety boils over into anger. ‘You know what? I think he’s fine, absolutely fine. Men like him always are!’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You could go to prison, Naomi. Isn’t it perjury, what you’ve done?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Probably? Is that all you can say? What’s wrong with you? Have you gone mad? This is so crazy, it’s . . .’ She bursts into tears.

  ‘There are worse things than going to prison for a bit,’ I tell her calmly. ‘They’re hardly going to lock me up for life, are they? And I’ll be able to say—truthfully—that I lied out of desperation. I’ve never been in trouble of any kind before. I’ve been a model citizen . . .’

  ‘You can’t even see what’s wrong with it, can you?’

  I consider this. ‘On one level, yes. On another, no,’ I say honestly. ‘And the level on which it’s right is the more important one.’ I search my brain for things I could say that might help. How does a person like me get through to a person like Yvon? Her tolerance vanishes at the first hint of trouble and her mind shuts down. Like a country that has introduced strict emergency measures after a frightening and unforeseen attack. ‘Look, by wrong, are you sure you don’t just mean unusual?’ I suggest.

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘Well . . . most people wouldn’t do what I’m doing. I know that. Most people would wait patiently, leave it in the hands of the proper authorities and hope for the best. Most people wouldn’t inflame the situation by claiming their missing lover was a dangerous criminal in the hope that the police would look for him more efficiently.’

  ‘That’s right! Most people wouldn’t!’ Her concern for me has mutated into fully fledged anger. ‘In fact, nobody would, except you!’

  ‘That’s what you object to, isn’t it? Because ninety-nine out of a hundred women wouldn’t do it, it has to be wrong, according to you!’

  ‘Can’t you hear how twisted that is? It’s the other way round! Because it’s wrong, ninety-nine out of a hundred women wouldn’t do it!’

  ‘No! Sometimes you have to be brave and do something that doesn’t fit in with the general pattern, just to shake things up a bit, to make things happen. If everyone thought like you, women still wouldn’t be allowed to vote!’

  We stare at one another, both short of breath.

  ‘I’m going to tell them.’ Yvon takes a step back, as if she’s about to run to the house. ‘I’ll tell the police everything you’ve just told me.’

  I shrug. ‘I’ll say you’re lying.’

  Her face crumples. She amends her threat. ‘If you don’t tell them, I will. I mean it, Naomi. What the fuck’s wrong with you? You’ve turned into some sort of sick weirdo!’

  The last time I had such direct verbal insults thrown at me, I was tied by ropes—first to a bed, then to a chair—and couldn’t do anything about it. There’s no way I’m putting up with it now from my so-called best friend.

  ‘I’ve done my best to explain it to you,’ I say coldly. ‘If you still don’t understand, tough. And if you tell the police what I’ve just told you, you can start looking for somewhere else to live. In fact, you can leave right now.’

  I have crossed another line. I seem to be doing it all the time these days. I wish I could erase my harsh words, swallow them back into my mouth, into non-existence, but I can’t. I have to keep this defiant, set expression on my face. I will not be seen as weak.

  Yvon turns to leave. ‘God help you,’ she says shakily. I want to scream after her that only a deeply conventional person would choose that as her last line before leaving.

  9

  4/5/06

  JULIET HAWORTH WAS wearing a dressing gown today, a lilac satin one. There were sleep creases on one side of her face when she opened the door. It was three-thirty in the afternoon. She didn’t look ill; neither did she apologise for her appearance, or seem embarrassed to be caught in her nightwear in the middle of the day, as Simon would have been.

  ‘Mrs Haworth? DC Waterhouse again,’ he said.

  She smiled through a yawn. ‘Can’t get enough of me, can you?’ she said. Yesterday she had been harsh and abrupt. Today she seemed to find Simon amusing.

  ‘That address you gave me in Kent—you lied. Your husband’s not there.’

  ‘My husband’s upstairs,’ she said, bending her head forward and swaying slightly, one hand on the round brass doorknob. She eyed Simon provocatively through her fringe. Was she trying to imply that she and Robert Haworth had been having sex, that Simon had interrupted them?

  ‘If that’s true, I’d like a word with him. Once you’ve explained why you lied to me about Kent.’

  Juliet’s smile expanded. Was she determined to prove to Simon that nothing he said could worry her? He wondered why her mood had improved since yesterday. Because Robert was back?

  She turned and shouted, ‘Robert! Make yourself decent. A policeman’s here who wants to see you.’

  ‘Your husband was never at twenty-two Dunnisher Road in Sissinghurst. They don’t know him at that address.’

  ‘I grew up in that house. It was my childhood home.’ Juliet Haworth looked pleased with herself.

  ‘Why did you lie?’ Simon asked again.

  ‘If I tell you, you won’t believe me.’

  ‘Try it and we’ll see.’

  Juliet nodded. ‘I had a sudden urge to lie. No reason—I just fancied it. See, I told you you wouldn’t believe me and you don’t. But it’s the truth.’ She undid the belt round her waist, pulled her dressing gown tighter around her, and retied it. ‘When I first saw you, I thought I’d probably lie again today. I needn’t have told you that Robert’s upstairs. But then I changed my mind and thought, Why not?’
r />   ‘You’re aware that obstructing the police is an offence?’

  Juliet giggled. ‘Absolutely. It wouldn’t be any fun otherwise, would it?’

  Simon felt wooden and self-conscious. Something about this woman interfered with his ability to think straight. She made him feel as if she knew more than he did about his own thoughts and actions. Did she expect him to push past her and go upstairs in search of her husband, or to challenge her further about her flagrant lies? Naomi Jenkins had also calmly admitted to lying, when Simon had spoken to her yesterday. Did Robert Haworth have a thing for dishonest women?

  Simon didn’t believe Haworth was upstairs. He hadn’t called out in response to his wife’s instruction to make himself decent. Juliet was still lying. Simon was reluctant to enter the house and allow her to close the door behind him. Something told him he might not emerge unscathed. He didn’t think Juliet Haworth would attack him physically, but he was having trouble, nevertheless, making himself enter her home as he knew he had to. As she undoubtedly wanted him to, for whatever reason. Yesterday she had been equally determined to keep him outside.

  Simon wished Charlie were with him. Seeing through other women was her speciality. He’d have given a lot to be able to talk to her about Naomi Jenkins too, the way she’d changed her story. But Charlie was on holiday. And she was pissed off with him, however carefully she was trying to hide it. Simon remembered this suddenly with a sort of perplexed irritation. All he’d said was that he might get in touch with Alice Fancourt, just to see how she was. Surely Charlie wouldn’t mind, after all this time? Anyway, she had no right to mind. She wasn’t his girlfriend, never had been. The same was true of Alice, Simon realised with a vague pang of regret.

  ‘You might think this is funny now,’ he told Juliet Haworth, ‘but you won’t when we get to the custody unit and I show you your cell.’