The Truth-Teller's Lie by Sophie Hannah

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