Hurting Distance aka The Truth-Teller's Lie

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘If you do that, I’ll . . .’

  ‘What? What will you do?’ Olivia’s nostrils flared. ‘Simon I’d have sent away, but not her.’ She nodded in the direction of the hall. ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself for a minute and think about what she’s been through. Think about what she went through only a few days ago, right here in this house, never mind the rest of it. Tied up, again. Nearly raped, again.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said Charlie quickly. She didn’t want to think about what Proust and Simon had found in her kitchen: Graham’s detached left eye, sliced neatly in two, staring up at them from a pool of blood.

  ‘I think I do,’ Olivia disagreed. ‘Because you seem to think you’re the only one who’s ever had anything bad happen to her.’

  ‘I don’t think that!’ said Charlie angrily.

  ‘Do you think it’s easy for me, knowing I can’t ever have children?’

  Charlie tutted quietly, turning away. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Any man I meet, any man I start a relationship with that’s even vaguely serious, I’ve got to break the bad news—imagine dropping that bombshell on a first date. You have no idea how many blokes I never see again, after I tell them. It really hurts, but I keep the pain to myself because I’m a stoic, and I believe in stiff upper lips . . .’

  ‘A stoic? You?’ Charlie laughed.

  ‘I am,’ Olivia insisted. ‘About serious things, I am. Just because I moan when my local deli runs out of venison and chilli pâté, that means nothing!’ She sighed. ‘You’re lucky, Char. Simon knows about you and Graham . . .’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘. . . and he knows it wasn’t your fault. No one blames you.’

  ‘All right, I’ll see Naomi.’ Anything to stop Olivia talking about Simon and Graham. Charlie stood up, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray on the table, which was already full of butts. They shifted and rearranged themselves—a writhing heap of fat, orangey-brown maggots—as a new one pressed down on the pile. How disgusting, thought Charlie, perversely pleased by the sight.

  Upstairs, she washed, brushed her hair and teeth, and put on the first clothes she saw when she opened her wardrobe: jeans with frayed ends and a lilac-and-turquoise rugby shirt with a white collar. When she came back downstairs, the front door was open, and Naomi Jenkins and Olivia were both outside. Naomi looked more relaxed than Charlie had ever seen her, but older as well. There were lines on her face that weren’t there two weeks ago.

  Charlie struggled to smile, and Naomi did her best to respond. This was what Charlie had wanted to avoid: the twisted, awkward greeting, acknowledging shared experience and pain that could never be forgotten.

  ‘Look,’ said Olivia. She appeared to be pointing at the front wall of the house, beneath the lounge window.

  Charlie pushed her feet into a pair of trainers that she’d discarded days ago by the bottom of the stairs, and went outside. Propped against the front wall was a sundial, a flat rectangle of grey stone, about four feet by three, and two inches deep. The gnomon was a solid iron triangle with a round lump, the shape of a large ball bearing, halfway along its top edge. The motto was in Latin, spelled out in gold letters: Docet umbra. At the very top of the dial, in the centre, was the bottom half of a sun. Its downward-slanting rays were the lines that represented the hours and half-hours: the time lines. Another line—a horizontal curve, the shape of a tilted smile—cut across these and ran all the way along the dial, from its left edge to its right.

  ‘I said I’d make one for your boss,’ said Naomi. ‘Here it is. You can have it, there’s no charge.’

  Charlie was shaking her head. ‘I won’t be back at work for a while.’ If ever. ‘Take it into the police station, ask for Inspector Proust . . .’

  ‘No. I’ve brought it here because I wanted to give it to you. It’s important to me.’ Naomi was trying to catch Charlie’s eye.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Olivia pointedly. ‘It’s very kind of you.’

  Charlie was convinced her sister was behaving well with the sole aim of making her seem even more ungracious by comparison. ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled.

  There was a heavy pause. Then Naomi said, ‘Simon Waterhouse told me you had no idea about Graham. When you got involved with him.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’

  ‘You shouldn’t punish yourself for something that wasn’t your fault. I did for years, and it got me nowhere.’

  ‘Goodbye, Naomi.’ Charlie turned to go back inside. If Olivia wanted to, she could bring the bloody sundial in. Charlie didn’t care. Proust had probably forgotten by now that he’d ever wanted one.

  ‘Wait. How’s Robert?’

  ‘The same,’ said Olivia, after Charlie failed to answer. ‘They keep trying to bring him round, but nothing so far. He’s still having epileptic fits, but not as often.’

  ‘If he does regain consciousness, he’ll be facing a long list of charges,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s clear from what we found at Silver Brae Chalets that he was very much involved in the stag-night business. He did a lot of the driving and took half the profits.’ Olivia would have told Naomi all this if Charlie hadn’t got her version in first. Olivia was the one who had spoken to Simon; Charlie had heard it all second-hand. She didn’t want Naomi to know the extent to which she’d relinquished her grip on her life. ‘Robert likes impersonal, bland places, doesn’t he? Service stations, the Traveltel, hospital? Just as well. Prison makes your average service station seem like the Ritz.’

  ‘He deserves whatever he gets,’ said Naomi, turning to Olivia when Charlie refused to look at her. ‘So does Graham. And his wife.’

  ‘They’ve both been refused bail—’ said Olivia.

  ‘All right, for fuck’s sake, that’ll do!’ Charlie cut her sister off.

  ‘Simon Waterhouse also said that Juliet hasn’t spoken for several days,’ said Naomi.

  Charlie looked up this time. Nodded. She didn’t like to think of Juliet Haworth sitting silently in a cell. Charlie would have felt better if Juliet were still making demands, taunting everybody she came into contact with. Juliet would also be going to prison for a long time, perhaps as long as Graham Angilley. It didn’t seem right.

  ‘What haven’t you told me?’ Charlie asked Naomi. ‘Juliet tried to kill Robert because she found out he’d colluded with her rapist—I know that much. What I still don’t know is, why did Robert deliberately befriend the women Graham had attacked?’ She felt herself getting sucked back in, and resented it. Naomi Jenkins had been playing games with her from the start, and Charlie wasn’t prepared to lose any more games.

  Naomi frowned. ‘I’ll tell you when it’s over,’ she said. ‘It’s not over yet.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Olivia. Charlie wished her sister would keep quiet, or, ideally, go back into the house. Where hopefully she might remember that she was an arts journalist and not a police officer.

  ‘There’s a date line on the sundial,’ said Naomi, pointing.

  Charlie looked again at the rectangular slab propped against her wall.

  ‘On the ninth of August, Robert’s birthday, the shadow of the nodus will follow that line exactly, follow the curve all the way along. This is the nodus, here.’ Naomi rubbed the small metal sphere with her thumb.

  Suspicion flared inside Charlie. ‘Why would you want to mark Robert’s birthday on a sundial and ask me to give it to my inspector?’

  ‘Because that’s when it began,’ said Naomi. ‘On the day Robert was born. The ninth of August,’ she repeated the date. ‘Remember to look, if it’s a sunny day.’

  She turned to leave with a small wave. Charlie and Olivia watched as she got into her car and drove away.

  33

  Thursday, May 4

  IT WILL GET better. I will get better. One day I will stand here and be able to breathe easily. One day I will feel brave enough to come here without Yvon. I will say the words ‘room eleven’ in another context—perh
aps about another hotel, a luxurious one on a beautiful island—and not think of this square room with its scratched double-glazed windows and chipped skirting boards. Or the pushed-together twin beds with their horrible orange gym-mat mattresses, or this building that looks like a shabby university hall of residence or a cheap conference centre.

  Yvon sits on the sofa, picking at the small bobbles on the cushions, while I stare out at the car park the Traveltel shares with Rawndesley East Services.

  ‘Don’t be cross with me,’ I say.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I know you think it’s bad for me, being here, but you’re wrong. I need this place to lose its significance. If I never came again, it’d always haunt me.’

  ‘The haunting would fade over time,’ Yvon obligingly contributes her lines to this by-now-familiar argument. ‘This Thursday-night pilgrimage of ours is keeping your memories alive.’

  ‘I have to do it, Yvon. Until I get bored, until coming here’s a chore. It’s like what people say about falling off a horse and being scared: you have to get straight back on.’

  She puts her head in her hands. ‘It’s so unlike that, I don’t know where to begin trying to explain it to you.’

  ‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’ I pick up the kettle with the peeling label and take it into the bathroom to fill it with water. At a safe distance from Yvon, I say, ‘Maybe I’ll stay here tonight. You don’t have to.’

  ‘No way.’ She appears in the doorway. ‘I’m not letting you do that. And I don’t believe this is what you say it is.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what Robert is, what he did, but you’re still pining for him, aren’t you? That’s why you want to be here. Where were you this afternoon? When I rang? You were out and you didn’t answer your mobile.’

  I look away, out of the window. There is a blue lorry pulling into the car park, black letters painted on its side. ‘I told you: I was sawing in my workshop. I didn’t hear my phone.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. I think you were in the hospital, sitting by Robert’s bedside. And it’s not the first time. There’ve been other times I’ve not been able to get hold of you recently . . .’

  ‘Intensive care’s a locked unit,’ I tell her. ‘You can’t just walk in. Yvon, I hate Robert. I hate him in the way you can only hate someone if you once loved them.’

  ‘I hated Ben that way once, and now look at us,’ she says, her voice full of scorn for us both.

  ‘It was your choice to give him another chance.’

  ‘And it’ll be yours to stay with Robert, if and when he wakes up. Despite everything. You’ll forgive him, the two of you’ll get married, you’ll go and visit him every week in prison . . .’

  ‘Yvon, I can’t believe you’re saying this.’

  ‘Don’t do it, Naomi.’

  A ringing sound comes from my jacket, which I slung down on the bed when Yvon and I first arrived. I pull my phone out of the pocket, thinking about love, about hurting distance. Thanks to my conversation with your brother in Charlie Zailer’s kitchen, I understand you better than I did before. I worked out for myself that you wanted to hurt women, and that you needed them to worship you first in order to magnify the hurt so that it was unbearable, but it wasn’t only about that, was it? Your psychosis is like a—what are those things called? That’s right: a palindrome. It works in reverse as well. Love and pain are inextricably linked in your mind—Graham made me see that. You believed that only if you injured and abused women would they ever truly love you. Dear Mama’s legacy, Graham said. However much you might have loved your mother before she turned on you, you loved her more afterwards, didn’t you? When your father left and she made you suffer, it was your anguish that forced you to acknowledge the strength of that love.

  ‘Naomi?’

  For a moment I mistake this man’s voice for yours. Only because of where I am.

  ‘It’s Simon Waterhouse. I thought you’d want to know. Robert Haworth died this afternoon.’

  ‘Good,’ I say, without hesitation, and not only for Yvon’s benefit. I mean it. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nobody’s sure yet. There’ll be a post-mortem, but . . . well, to put it simply, it looks like he just stopped breathing. It sometimes happens, after bad brain bleeds. The swollen brain can’t send messages to the respiratory system in the way that it needs to. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I tell him. ‘I’m only sorry that the hospital staff think he died a natural, peaceful death. He didn’t deserve that.’ It would be easy to tell myself you were a damaged person, sick, as much a victim as your victims. I refuse to do that. Instead, I will think of you as evil. I have to draw a line, Robert.

  You are dead. I’m talking—directing my thoughts—to nobody. Your memories and justifications, they’re all gone. I don’t feel elated. It’s more the sensation of crossing something off a list and feeling lighter. Now there’s only one more thing to cross off, and when that’s done, this will be over. Maybe then I’ll be able to stop coming here. Maybe room eleven has become the headquarters of my operation, until close of business.

  That’s assuming Charlie Zailer cares enough about closing our business to start thinking about that sundial I gave her.

  As if he is reading my mind, Simon Waterhouse asks, ‘Have you—I’m sorry to ask you this, but have you spoken to Sergeant Zailer recently? There’s no reason why you should have, it’s just . . .’ His voice tails off.

  I am tempted to ask him if he’s seen the sundial. Perhaps Charlie’s sister took it in and gave it to the inspector who wanted it. I would like, one day, to walk past Spilling Police Station and see it there, on the wall. I wonder if I should mention anything about the dial to Simon Waterhouse. I decide not to. ‘I’ve tried,’ I tell him, ‘but I don’t think Charlie wants to speak to anyone at the moment. Apart from Olivia.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he says. His descending voice tells me very clearly that it isn’t.

  34

  5/19/06

  CHARLIE SAT AT a window table in Mario’s—a small, loud, Italian café in Spilling’s market square—so that she could watch the street. She’d see Proust before he came in, which would give her time to arrange her features. Into what? She didn’t really know.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d left the house since coming back from Scotland—Olivia had made her walk round the block and to the corner shop every few days, claiming it would be good for her—but it was the first time she’d been out alone, to a proper place, to meet someone. Even if that someone was only the Snowman.

  Naomi Jenkins’ sundial was leaning against the wall of the café, attracting bemused glances, and some admiring ones, from waitresses and other customers. Charlie wished she’d wrapped it, but it was too late now. Still, at least it was the dial everyone was looking at and not her. She dreaded the day when someone in the road would point at her and yell, ‘Hey’s it’s that woman copper, the one who screwed that rapist.’ Charlie had decided to grow her hair, to avoid being recognised. When it was longer, she might dye it blond.

  Proust was in front of her; she’d forgotten to look out for him. Most of the time, she thought, the real world might as well not exist. She barely heard the CD of famous opera arias that was deafening everybody else in Mario’s, or the flamboyant owner’s loud, tuneless vocal accompaniment from behind the counter. Charlie’s universe had been reduced to a few agonising thoughts that repeated endlessly in her mind: why did I have to meet Graham Angilley? Why was I stupid enough to fall for him? Why has my name been all over the papers and the news while he’s protected by anonymity? Why is life so fucking unfair?

  ‘Morning, Charlie,’ said the inspector awkwardly. He was carrying a large paperback book, the one about sundials that Simon had bought for him. He’d never called Charlie by her first name before. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A sundial, sir.’

  ‘You don’t need to call me sir,’ said Proust. ‘We’re in a café,’ he added, as i
f it were an explanation.

  ‘It’s yours for free. Even Superintendent Barrow can’t object to that.’

  Proust looked disgruntled. ‘Free? Did Naomi Jenkins make it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t like the motto. Docet umbra: the shadow informs. It’s too pedestrian.’

  ‘Is that what it means?’ Of course. Charlie should have guessed the words were significant.

  ‘When are you coming back?’ Proust asked.

  ‘I don’t know if I am.’

  ‘You have to ride it out. The quicker you put it behind you, the sooner everyone’ll forget.’

  ‘Really? If one of my colleagues slept with a famous serial rapist, I don’t think I’d forget about it.’

  ‘All right, perhaps people won’t forget,’ said Proust impatiently, as if this were a mere detail. ‘But you’re a good officer and you did nothing wrong.’ Giles Proust, determined to remain upbeat? This was a first.

  ‘So why the official inquiry?’ said Charlie.

  ‘That wasn’t my decision. Look, it’ll be over before you know it. Between you and me, it’s just a formality, and . . . you have my full support.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘And . . . everyone else . . . also wants to . . .’ Evidently the Snowman didn’t know how to broach the subject of Simon. He fiddled with the cuffs of his shirt, then picked up the laminated menu and examined it studiously.

  ‘What’s Simon Waterhouse told you to say?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Why won’t you see him? The man’s beside himself.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You could speak to him on the telephone.’

  ‘No.’ Every time Simon’s name was mentioned, Charlie felt her composure start to unravel.

  ‘Email?’ Proust sighed. ‘Come back to work, Sergeant. The first few days might be awkward, but after that . . .’

  ‘Not awkward. A nightmare. And after that, the next few days’ll be a nightmare. Every day will be a nightmare, until I retire. And even then—’ Charlie stopped, realising her voice had started to shake.