Sophie Hannah - Hurting Distance

‘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 myself 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 . . .’