As Darkness Falls

7

Sometimes Sara hated the world. She hated what the world did to people who deserved much better.

Zoe still hadn’t talked any more about her father, or about his imminent release, and Sara was starting to worry about that silence. It seemed to be going on for too long.

Sara worried. She wanted to help Zoe, but didn’t know exactly what to do. She decided she needed advice. She needed to talk to someone who knew more about the situation than she did. She waited a couple more days, until she had an hour of form filling-in to do at work, and then she drifted up to the sex crimes unit on the second floor, and hung around there until someone noticed her. Everyone knew everyone by sight in a smaller police station, and sex crimes weren’t as bad as major crimes were about protecting their turf.

Eventually one of the detectives noticed Sara and asked what she needed.

Advice, Sara said. She thought a friend might have been sexually assaulted, but the friend didn’t seem to want to talk about it.

“Oh yeah?” the detective said, and gave Sara a look. Exactly the same look as Sara would have given someone else who’d just told her that.

“Not me,” Sara added.

The detective kept looking at her.

Being a cop made it easier to lie, Sara sometimes thought, and especially to lie to other cops. Or to avoid questions she didn’t want to answer, which was really the same thing. She was around liars a lot, at work, listening to liars a lot. It rubbed off, somehow. She had some idea how to lie well herself. She knew to tell enough of the story someone expected that they heard what they wanted to hear, even if it was a different story to the truth. She knew to pretend to say too much, apparently by mistake, so that what she’d added, apparently accidentally, seemed to confirm everything else. Other cops were actually easier to lie to, she thought. She could guess their suspicions more easily, because they were her own. She could guess their suspicions, guess what they were thinking, and then say the right things to alleviate those suspicions. And as well, she already knew the tricks of open-ended questions and doubtful stares and all the other ways to make people uncomfortable enough that they kept on talking, saying more than they’d meant to. She knew to avoid those tricks. Tricks like the sceptical look this detective was giving her right now.

Sara knew those tricks, and how to avoid then, so she did exactly what seemed natural, what seemed innocent and truthful, and what the detective expected her to do. She pretended to talk too much, to nervously explain more than she’d intended.

“Really not me,” Sara said. “A friend who isn’t that close. And I think that if anything happened, she only mentioned it because I’m in the police, and I’m not even completely sure anything happened at all.”

The detective kept staring. Wondering whether to ask directly if it was her, Sara thought. She didn’t want to be asked. She didn’t want to say anything more.

She was lying to a colleague, and that was bad, and usually she wouldn’t. But now, to protect Zoe’s privacy, she did it without a thought. She already knew she’d do far worse for Zoe. Lying to another cop was the least of it.

“It’s really not me,” Sara said again, and after a moment the detective seemed to accept that.

“What makes you think something happened?” the detective said.

“Nothing particular,” Sara said. “It’s just a feeling. Something she implied while we were talking.”

The detective looked at her, and waited. Probably from old habit, Sara thought, rather than any particular suspicion. All the same, Sara pretended to nervously say too much again.

“She implied it,” Sara said. “Then wouldn’t talk any more when I asked, that was all. So now I’m being all…”

“Cop-like?”

Sara grinned. “Yeah, pretty much. And wondering if I should say anything, or not say anything. Like how best to be a mate, if you see what I mean, rather than how to get her to make a complaint.”

“Yeah,” the detective said. “Fair enough.”

“So if you can tell me anything useful…?”

“About how to help?”

Sara nodded.

“Mainly just think how you’d feel if it was you,” the detective said.

“Oh. Okay.”

“Is it a she?” the detective said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, think how she’s feeling. You want her to report it, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, even if you don’t, you have some idea of what you think she ought to do. So you have an agenda, so you need to keep remembering this is her thing, not yours, and make sure not to push her. Instead, just be there and let her deal with it how she wants to.”

Sara thought about that. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay. Thank you.”

“And just remember it’s complicated. And keep thinking how you’d feel if it was you. She might be friends with the attacker, or have feelings for that person. It might have happened when she thought she was having a wonderful night, having fun. She might feel ashamed.”

Sara nodded again.

“And she might wish she’d never told you at all,” the detective said. “If she thinks you’ll come straight in here and talk to us regardless of how she feels.”

“Um,” Sara said. “Yeah.”

“But you know her. So just do what seems right for her. Trust yourself.”

Sara thought about that for a while. “Trust myself?”

The detective nodded. “Because you know her. And you know how you’d feel if it was you. So trust yourself.”

“Thank you,” Sara said. “That actually helps.”

It did. The part about trusting herself, especially. It felt right. She knew Zoe. She trusted Zoe. She should trust Zoe to know what Zoe needed, and to ask Sara for it when she was ready, and she should also trust herself to know when it was the time to do what Zoe asked.

Feeling better about the situation, she went back downstairs to finish her arrest-and-stop forms. Before she finished, though, she was called out to help secure a crime scene. She stood in the street and directed traffic and maintained a perimeter around a takeaway shop that had just been robbed.

She stood in the street and waved cars away, and thought about Zoe and how far she would be prepared to go for her.