She is the question they cannot solve and it maddens them. They see their own wives in her, in those moments of disdain they catch and ignore but cannot quite forget. She is the short-skirted shop-girl who mocks their hungry glances. With their fingers crowding and cramming up inside her they still cannot have her. She has killed her husband’s children, the children she bore him, and yet she refuses to appear insane. Where are her tears? Why doesn’t she beg? With punches to her ribs and mouth they look for the contrition that will let them sleep easily again, by their wives and mistresses, and across the hallway from their daughters, but finding nothing, and losing hope they walk away loudly naming her a Crazy Bitch, in the hope that it might after all be true.

Medea’s body turns in the wind. She seems foreign to Becky, in a way that is new to her. She had been so certain, once, of the meaning of the Medea they had crafted from draft to draft, refining and testing each turn until the character’s pain and complexity and her terrible crime was all worked through and mapped, scene by scene. It had made sense then, on paper. But all of that has gone now. The camera lingers on Medea’s face, her eyes still open, pooled with blood from her injuries, yet seeming still to see. She looks dead ahead, scanning the horizon as if she is looking for someone. But who? She knows where her children are. Those that were coming for her have arrived and departed. The leaves on the tree above her bow and ripple. Her body turns to distant rooftops, a church spire, a young girl in the distance, looking at her.

‘I want to report a rape,’ Becky had said.

Becky remembers the sharp pivot to soft kindness in the officer’s voice when she said, quickly, ‘I’ll go and get someone.’

Moments later Becky was seated in an interview room with white-painted cinderblock walls and cloud-grey linoleum floor.

A detective had entered, ‘Detective Inspector Whitecross,’ she’d said, but Becky didn’t say anything in response. All she could focus on was the fine telephone wire of dried tea on the rim of the Detective’s mug. She was thinking about Maisie. How would Maisie cope when she found out? Would she have to find out? Might she be spared?

DI Whitecross offered her tea, by way of a gentle reminder that there was talking to be done in this room. Becky shook her head.

‘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.