‘I witnessed a rape and I’d like to give a statement,’ said Becky, because if she hadn’t spoken quickly, she might have lost her nerve.
I was raped, Becky said to herself. I was raped. I know I was.
And now I am in the five point seven per cent of people who report rape. I am five point seven per cent.
‘Let me just turn on the recorder, if you’re happy for me to tape this? Saves a few pencils.’
Becky nodded and started talking before she lost her nerve.
‘The woman was out of it. I didn’t recognize her at the time. I found out later on that she was an actress called Amber Heath.’
I was out of it for years. My name is Rebecca Shawcross.
The chief inspector wrote in her pad as the recorder ran.
‘I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. But it didn’t look happy. I don’t think it looked consensual, though I know you can’t tell. All I can tell you is that I was there. I saw them. I saw her.’
My arms and legs and lungs and stomach, all of me has hurt every day since I was sixteen.
‘The man’s name is Matthew Kingsman,’ she said. ‘He is my boss, at a film production company called Kingfisher Films.’
The man’s name is Adam Thewlis. He was once my best friend.
I am in the ninety per cent of people who know the identity of their rapist. I am ninety per cent.
‘It happened less than two weeks ago. The fifteenth of May. I went to drop off some wine at his house and I saw them together and then I left.’
It happened sixteen years ago. Very late one Saturday night, or early one Sunday morning.
‘I know she made a statement saying she’d been raped. She thought there was a witness and she asked them to come forward. I made a statement to the press where I said I supported my boss. I denied being there. I should have said something sooner. I should have come forward.’
I woke up and someone had had sex with me. There was nobody there. Nobody said anything to me afterwards. But it happened. Maisie is proof that it happened.
‘You’re here now. That’s what matters,’ said the detective, smiling a smile that wasn’t really a smile, and then she asked more questions: time of day, clothing, before, after.
He knows the truth. He knows that I need the truth, but then he’s always known that, and he kept it from me. He was there. I barely was.
‘Did anything prompt you to come forward now?’
Becky sat in a long silence.
Finally the detective said, ‘The matter will be joined up with the sexual offences unit and you will be informed if anyone is charged with the offence. You might be required for any court case that arises.’
The tape recorder clicked to a close. And Becky was free to go.
Scott asked her later, ‘Didn’t you know what would happen?’ He meant the headlines. Those scathing think-pieces that labelled Becky a Judas, a betrayer of women, an enabler of misogyny. A woman who lied to defend her rapist boss. A woman who let an actress spiral down to attempted suicide, disbelieved and pilloried as an attention-seeker, for the sake of her own glittering career. All the photos of Becky and Matthew together in Cannes. She hadn’t been aware so many were being taken.
‘Yes,’ she had said. ‘I knew.’
The question the papers asked again and again: why did she come forward now? Why speak up unless she’d been found out, or had let it slip to someone, or had been nailed to the truth by some last-minute piece of CCTV?
There was no doubt left in the public mind; a woman had said she was raped, and there had been a witness. Therefore it had happened. And that meant Becky had beyond doubt witnessed a rape and had chosen to say nothing. She had instead supported the man who paid her wages and promoted her. You’d know when someone is being raped, wrote one commentator. If there was doubt, you’d say something. What is worse, a little embarrassment or letting an attacker go unchallenged? Sometimes the articles made Becky doubt what she knew. Had she coldly calculated the cost-benefit of letting Amber suffer?
Someone from the hotel in Camber recognized her picture and sold their story – Matthew’s payment for her no-expenses-spared weekend away. The spoils of a war on women, in which she was a collaborator. That sealed things in the public mind. And it did look bad, she knew it. ‘The optics were bad,’ said one journalist.
She tried to hang on to her truth. And eventually she stopped reading the articles.
She had chosen to live with it. She gave no interviews, no comments, no quiet inside-briefings to defend herself. There was going to be a trial and, having elected to give Amber the truth, at the cost of near everything, how could she jeopardize Amber’s chance of getting justice? Why try to save herself?
‘Was it worth it?’ Scott had asked her.
‘Yes, it was. I think so.’
Then Scott had asked her permission for him to give her a hug, which sounded so quaintly old-fashioned that she almost asked why on earth he’d ask that, before she remembered exactly why he might ask first, and then she was so moved by his thoughtfulness that she couldn’t let him out of her arms, not for five long minutes.
The film is nearly over, but Becky knows that two more people are yet to visit her from the screen. In an interview ahead of the film’s premiere, Emilia had spoken about how Sharon convinced her to stay in the role, disclosing a new plan for the film’s final scene. It had ‘moved me deeply, as a piece of art. It puts life in all its pain into the heart of the story’, Emilia had said.
That scene now begins to play.
Becky has read enough reviews to know that
