Actors so often look smaller in real life than they do on screen, but when Becky saw the magazine pictures of Amber exiting court after her testimony, she wasn’t just small, she was downright thin, utterly vulnerable, childlike. The facts of Amber’s last suicide attempt had pushed at Becky’s thoughts. It wouldn’t take much to end a life as fragile as hers seemed in the pictures of that day on those courtroom steps, under a winter sun.

But she looks better today. There is colour in her cheeks. She seems slim, not skeletal. She has been working; Becky knows this from following her on Twitter, on the account she once used to spy on Scott, back when he had been her rapist. Amber has been heard and believed. She is not a lunatic after all.

They won’t prosecute, Adam had told her, way back when the question of what she might owe Amber had seemed in the balance. And yet they had taken it to court, despite the paucity of evidence. In fact, Matthew’s own arrogance had seen to that.

The trial had begun in winter, on a day when the heating had broken down in the courthouse.

It was here that Becky learned that the day after Matthew had given her his side of events, he had volunteered a statement to the police. He must have been sure, at that point, that Becky’s silence was sealed. He had her loyalty.

Perhaps then he felt he could afford to rewrite the narrative, with Becky’s place in it wiped as surely as his CCTV footage.

There was history between Amber and I. An affair. A few separate nights in London at my club and one, perhaps two, weekends, out of London. I ended it soon after the Hampshire weekend because she was needy, a little unstable. The girl needed a boyfriend and some therapy. I’d said I would be happy for her to seek my advice any time, because the film business is capricious and tricky to navigate. It chews people up and spits them out. I like to be able to help.

I called her up the following weekend to say the kids were out of town so she should come to the house to sort things once and for all. I thought I could give her some useful numbers for people. A psychiatrist, for one thing.

He told the police: We drank a lot. I was having a nice time.

He said: She sat on my lap. She wasn’t wearing any knickers. It was a seduction.

Amber, in her evidence, instead offered: He came and sat next to me on the sofa. Put his hand up my skirt and tried to pull my knickers off. I told him no, but I did kiss him. I wanted to leave but I didn’t want to be rude.