The Truth-Teller's Lie by Sophie Hannah Page A

refreshments. Is there a sliding scale? Tea for rape, sparkling water for sexual assault, tap water for a mugging?’
    His expression hardens. ‘I’ve read what you wrote. What you say you wrote.’
    ‘You don’t believe me?’ He’s more stubborn than I thought. I prepare to go into battle. I like a good fight, especially when I know I can win. ‘How would I know it was there if I hadn’t written it? You think women who haven’t been raped cruise rape websites for fun, and then when they find a story that happens to have their initials at the bottom—’
    ‘“My attacker was someone I had never seen before and have not seen since,”’ Waterhouse reads aloud from one of the pages in his hand. He’s printed out my letter. I baulk, uncomfortable with the idea that it’s in the room with us.
    I speak quickly, before he can read me any more of my own words. ‘I didn’t know who he was at the time. I found out later. I saw him again. Like I told you, I bumped into him at Rawndesley East Services on Thursday the twenty-fourth of March last year.’
    Waterhouse is shaking his head, flicking through his papers. ‘You didn’t say that,’ he contradicts me flatly. ‘You said you first met Mr Haworth on that date, but not where you met him.’
    ‘Well, that’s where I met him. At the service station. But it wasn’t the first time. The first time was when he raped me.’
    ‘Rawndesley East Services. At the Traveltel?’
    I picture Waterhouse’s brain as a computer. Everything I tell him is a new piece of data to enter. ‘No. In the food-court bit. What I said about the Traveltel was a lie. I know there’s a Traveltel at Rawndesley East Services, and I wanted to keep my lie as close to the truth as possible.’
    ‘What about room eleven? The same room every time?’ He says this more quietly and sensitively than he’s said anything else. It’s a bad sign. He watches me carefully.
    ‘I made that up. I’ve never been inside the Traveltel or any of its rooms.’
    Once he’s heard my story, he will be in no doubt that I’m telling the truth; he won’t bother to talk to staff at the Traveltel. And he knows I know this is something he could easily check. So why, he will think, would I tell such a risky lie?
    ‘So you met Mr Haworth, your rapist, for the second time on the twenty-fourth of March last year, in the food court of Rawndesley East Services?’
    ‘Yes. I saw him. He didn’t see me.’
    Waterhouse leans back in his chair, throws his pen down on the desk. ‘It must have been a shock, seeing him like that.’
    I say nothing.
    ‘How did you find out his name and where he lived?’
    ‘I followed him out to his van. It’s got his name and phone number on it. I got his address from the phone book.’ He can ask me anything. I will have my answer ready—a good, plausible answer—within seconds. Every time he draws my attention to a detail that he hopes will trip me up, I find a way to work it into my story. Everything can be reconciled. All I have to do is approach it methodically: this must be the case, and this must also be the case. What story will make that possible?
    ‘I can’t see it,’ says Waterhouse. ‘You know his name, you know where he lives. You said you were thinking about taking things into your own hands. Why didn’t you?’
    ‘Because if I’d ended up with a criminal record, that’d be another victory for him, wouldn’t it? I told you, I wanted the police to turn up at his house and give him the fright of his life. I didn’t want to have to . . . be face to face with him myself.’
    ‘So you cooked up a whole story about an affair, room eleven every Thursday night, your friend ringing up and speaking to Mr Haworth’s wife?’
    ‘Yes.’
    He consults his notes. ‘Do you have a friend and lodger called Yvon?’
    I hesitate. ‘Yes. Yvon Cotchin.’
    ‘So not everything you said yesterday was a lie. That’s at least one lie you’ve told today, then. What about the