Blurred Lines: The most timely and gripping psychological thriller of 2020

by Hannah Begbie

Becky tries to breathe deeply, relax her face, will her eyes to beam normality. ‘I have to get to bed.’

  ‘Wait. We were talking. I thought we could have a bit of that rhubarb gin Kate gave me?’

  ‘What?’ She feels a flash of annoyance at how Kate has even managed to infiltrate what they might drink together. ‘No, sorry, I have to work early in the morning,’ she says. He looks crestfallen, but she can’t focus on him. Only Amber now. ‘Leave the washing up and I’ll do it tomorrow.’

  As she hammers up the stairs, statistics float in and out, unbidden, half-remembered from stories and reports that she has read over the years.

  Approximately ninety per cent of those who are raped know the perpetrator prior to the offence. Does that put Becky in the remaining ten per cent? Or the ninety per cent? She has never known. She has never felt she belonged anywhere inside those numbers.

  She locks herself in the bathroom, sliding her back down the door and huddling there, next to the warmth of the radiator. Clutches her phone close, reading back and forth, again and again, pulling out the possibilities between the reported facts like they are already there, writ large for everyone to see.

  Online they are speculating that the witness was Matthew’s wife. What’s her name? Charlotte? Anne? Antonia.

  There are only two people in the world who know for certain that ‘the woman in the kitchen’ wasn’t Antonia. Becky, and Antonia.

  Does Matthew know it was her?

  Amber saw enough to know that it was a woman looking at her. Will she identify Becky from the press picture of the restaurant?

  Was there CCTV footage of her entering Matthew’s house? How long is that kept? Will the police really go to those lengths?

  The man in the wine shop. Why did she have to make small talk with him? Why not simply buy the thing and leave? Why couldn’t she do that?

  Her credit card will prove she was there. Surely the police wouldn’t look there …

  She doesn’t know what to do.

  Should she come forward and say she was there?

  If asked, should she say she got all the way to Matthew’s door perhaps, but turned back? Never went inside. Would that be enough?

  But if she came forward now she’d put her own livelihood at risk, the career she’s been building, Medea, her growing reputation. And what would Maisie think of her if she found out? It would create problems just at a time when they both need to be focused and stable. She must be stable.

  She thinks of the burnt pan and the Volt trainers, those petty things she’d been concerned about earlier in the evening, and what Adam said: maybe he was right when he said the universe puts good things and good people in your path. It’s important to be able to honour that.

  Matthew has been so kind and generous this past year, she’d be nowhere without him. Surely Becky owes him more than going to the police and reporting what she may, or may not, have seen? Surely she owes him so much more than a betrayal?

  Can she say nothing?

  Chapter 17

  The next evening, Becky slices through mushrooms, peppers, onions – far more than she needs for the recipe, but she finds the rocking motion of the knife soothing, the clean cut through skins, satisfying. She throws the vegetables into the wok. She can at least do this. She can at least feed her daughter well. The oil spits onto the backs of her hands and she lets it, feeling the scatter of needle-prick stings through her skin. The sound of the doorbell wrenches her out of this thing, this controlled stupor.

  ‘Mum, it’s for you,’ Maisie calls out, before returning to her piles of books and notes in the living room.

  ‘Rebecca Shawcross?’ asks the young man at the doorstep, glancing at his phone screen.

  She is expecting a package to sign for: contracts or new bound scripts from the office, or perhaps that hand-made photo album she’d ordered for Maisie’s birthday. Here at last.

  ‘Can I help you with something?’ She wipes her palms down her jeans.

  He glances up at her with pale green, watchful eyes, circled with dry flaking skin and red patches. He looks like an iguana, she thinks. ‘I’m from The Sun newspaper,’ he says. ‘I need a quote.’

  She grips the doorframe with one hand to control the anxious quiver that has set itself waving through her blood. ‘What about?’

  ‘The allegations made by Amber Heath against Matthew Kingsman.’

  She thinks the fire engine-red T-shirt he is wearing is too bright and that his wax jacket has too many pockets. He looks like the pixelated screen of a computer game and why won’t her thoughts stop skirting, tripping, glitching?

  ‘I don’t think any allegations have been made, have they?’

  ‘Yeah, all right, she didn’t outright name him, but everyone knows she’s talking about Matthew Kingsman.’

  ‘So what’s your question?’ she says impatiently.

  ‘Amber Heath seems to be alleging,’ he is speaking slowly, as if to a very young child, ‘that she was raped by Matthew Kingsman. Do you have any comment about that?’

  ‘She seems to be alleging?’

  ‘Do you have a comment about it?’

  ‘I’m not going to comment on rumours and gossip. Nobody should.’

  The doorframe in her grip feels like a monumental shield.

  ‘What about your film?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I heard it’s fallen apart over this.’

  ‘That’s not true. And look, I know this is your job, so I’m not being an arsehole about it, but I can’t spend all day going through everything that’s not true in the world. So we should probably leave it there. Thanks.’

  She closes the door on him.

  Is it true? Has her film died?

  She rests her forehead against the cool, painted wood but it does nothing to stop the waters from rising around her. Adam is leaving them, heading for Kate’s bed. Her film is shrivelling into dust. She has no map, no boundary, no place to go, no beacon, no co-ordinates with which to navigate her past, present and future, and there is no end in sight for her anger and sadness. She has a void. She has toxic grime. She fears these will swell, now that their bounds are fraying, like an aggressive cancer, an unwanted, metastasizing thing piling on weight and kicking against her from her own insides.

  How to hold onto her film, save Matthew, save the company and save herself? Her mind tingles and crackles with only small, weak possibilities. She doesn’t have anything good. Isn’t it her job to solve this?

  ‘When’s dinner?’ calls Maisie, but Becky doesn’t know what to say in response. She can’t think about food, routine, basic needs like hunger or thirst or exhaustion. She runs quickly and quietly up the stairs and closes the door so as not to make a sound. Through the bedroom window she can see the journalist leaning against a car bonnet, tapping something into his mobile phone.

  She needs guidance. Needs not to feel so alone in her fear.

  She dials Matthew’s mobile number.

  ‘Matthew, I …’ She wants to ask him is it true, is her film really dead? ‘There’s a journalist at my door wanting a quote about you. About Amber.’

  There is a pause on the line and she wonders whether he is angry with her for calling him. Whether she’s done the wrong thing by adding to his worries. She should be able to handle this.

  ‘You have to ignore him, if you can, ignore him.’

  Had she ignored him enough? Had she said too much?

  ‘How long is this going to last?’ she says.

  ‘I don’t know. This hasn’t happened to me before.’ There is a tightness and anger edging his voice.

  ‘I’m not complaining,’ she says quickly. ‘I know this is horrendous for you. I just wanted to ask, I mean I don’t know, what to, you know, I didn’t say, well, what should I say?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nice things!’ He sounds almost amused. ‘Tell the truth, Becky. Say that’s not the man you know. I just spoke to Pips.’ He is solemn now, talking about Pips, Matthew’s pet name for his
son Bart, a year younger than Maisie. ‘Someone tried to talk to him as he came home from school.’

  ‘Oh God. They’re such shits.’

  Becky can’t help but picture it. The child being asked those questions: Is the man who loves you also a man who holds down women who are not your mother, and rapes them on the same rug where you still open your birthday present?

  ‘Pips is so upset.’ There is a wobble in Matthew’s voice, and it is this that fills her with rage that this arrogant and bloodthirsty journalist is taking up space, her space, outside her house.

  She hangs up. Hammers down the steps. Opens the door with so much force the joint of her arm stretches and burns with pain.

  ‘Matthew Kingsman is a good man,’ she spits. ‘He’s a family man who loves his wife and kids. He’s worked hard over decades to build a company that supports talented film-makers. He invests in women as staff and in telling women’s stories on screen. I’ve never seen anything to make me doubt him. These allegations are terribly hurtful and destructive and people should think twice before acting judge, jury and executioner.’

  ‘Were you the woman in the kitchen?’ he says.

  ‘Was I the what?’

  ‘The witness.’

  ‘This is ridiculous. I’m not going to be part of a witch-hunt. Goodbye.’

  The alerts come in for The Sun on Sunday online story the next morning and it’s worse than she imagined. There’s a large photo of Becky walking into work: earphones in, collar up on a denim jacket, bag slung across her shoulders. She remembers the outfit, the day, but she hadn’t seen a photographer. Where had he been hiding? Had there been others?

  They write that she has denied being ‘the woman in the kitchen’. Siobhan’s had the same treatment.

  She realizes that she has chosen a side, in typed and reported words she can read back to herself, that tens of thousands of others can read. She can’t be in the house any more where the air is too close to breathe and it feels like everything is watching her, listening to her.

  ‘Maisie,’ she calls up the stairs. ‘I have to go, I have to go for a run.’

  Maisie emerges from the living room, concern clouding her face. ‘I thought we were about to have breakfast together? I thought we were making—’

  ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to make toast. I’ve run out of time. I have to get out, I’m sorry, I just …’

  Becky makes her way gingerly through the hallway. Laces up trainers. She doesn’t bother replacing her tracksuit bottoms with running trousers. Doesn’t say any more, just runs out into the early morning sun, past the window where her daughter is standing and watching her.

  She threads through people on the pavements, going far too slow.

  She has become not the woman in the kitchen. Another lifelong lie to commit to. She has done it once, she can do it again. She knows how to hide the feel of it. She can do this.

  She needs to get to the park quicker than this. She speeds up, brushes shoulders with a harassed mother pushing a pram: enough for the woman to spin round and accuse Becky of terrible manners with only a look in her eyes.

  She tells herself to calm down. Hears Matthew’s reasoning voice. What does she owe the newspapers? For them it’s a scoop, some sales. They don’t care. The people she owes are the boss who believed in her, the daughter whose home needs to be paid for, the film she has worked so hard to bring into life and which wants to say something important about women. These are real things and they are worth protecting.

  Maybe this is OK.

  A child’s scream drives itself through her skin.

  Did Matthew’s PR people reach out to Amber? Did they offer her a deal for a more cheerful rebuttal, Oh that, that’s all fine! In exchange for working again? For money, maybe? A deal she maybe turned down?

  Did Alex’s stories of her emotional and physical messiness only follow when she refused?

  What does Amber know?

  She glances around the park. The pink Lycra-clad jogger, the khaki-coated dog walker, the dog itself, they’re all judging her. Of course they are.

  She didn’t know, she wants to say to them all, she didn’t know what the woman on the floor of that kitchen was feeling.

  She runs faster now, fast enough for the sides of her lungs to hurt and gasp and rasp.

  She had fled from the kitchen that Sunday afternoon, embarrassed to have been caught seeing Matthew with a woman who wasn’t his wife. That was all. That’s all she saw, all she thought she saw.

  Becky pictures Pips in tears on his bed, his father made monstrous to him, and Matthew desperate to console him, to convince him that there are liars in the world. Liars who can reach out and harm you and who need to be fought.

  She runs through the aches in her lungs. She wants to test the limits of her legs and her heart, to see how far her body can carry her before it starts to feel light and faint, for the edges of her vision to go cloudy white before everything fades to a pinpoint and then black.

  Is Becky strong enough for the fight? She feels the question like a prosecutor’s interrogation. Perhaps she is. She should be. She doesn’t think she is.

  Rebecca Shawcross denies being the woman in the kitchen and has launched a strongly worded defence of the man she credits as ‘investing in women as staff and in telling women’s stories on screen.’ She said, ‘I’ve never seen anything to make me doubt him.’

  Once at home, she races to the bathroom. Locks the door behind her with one hand while scrolling through her phone with the other.

  Twitter friends post on their timelines that they know Rebecca and believe her. She is a good woman and a talented producer and deserves better than this shit-show.

  Does she? Does she deserve better? She switches to Scott’s Instagram account before she allows the thought to take root further.

  Scott is modelling different outfits for THE BIG NIGHT on his feed. Monochrome suit and tie? Nothing says style like black and white. Or fluoro-green T-shirt and jacket, perhaps. Dare to stand out?

  She grits her teeth. ‘Dare to stand out?’ she hisses, and types beneath his post:

  I hate you, I fucking hate you so much, I hate you I hate you I hate you

  But even as she watches the words appear she knows they are empty, pointless, not enough, never enough and so she stops.

  Delete, delete, delete

  She opens the bathroom medicine cabinet and finds the nail scissors.

  She sits on the edge of the bath, eyes closed, breathing hard still from the exertion of exercise and the adrenaline tracking hot and alive through her veins.

  She rolls down her joggers, then makes a tiny cut on the inside of her thigh, a V-shaped snip, the shape of a baby bird’s beak. Blood pours out of its mouth.

  Chapter 18

  Monday morning she wakes as dawn is breaking, after only a few hours’ sleep.

  It’s not yet eight a.m. when she turns on her phone and picks up one message from Emilia’s agent, Sam, asking her to call, and a second from Matthew summoning her to his house for a catch-up.

  Maisie, home for a planned revision day, returns from the corner shop with milk and a copy of The Sun.

  ‘They’ve laid out ten suspects for “the woman in the kitchen”,’ she says, hair fallen either side of a paler than usual face. ‘Lily just messaged me the article. Told me she’d seen the actual paper. Said I should get one for the archives. To show my grandchildren.’ She looks up from beneath her hair. ‘One of the suspects is you.’

  Becky swallows and smiles. She can do this for her daughter. She can be calm and reassuring.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘But it’s fine. Obviously it’s not me. And look, everyone they’ve got has denied it. Only Matthew’s wife hasn’t, but she hasn’t said anything to anyone. And come on!’ She tries a laugh. ‘They’ve even put Julia Roberts in as a potential suspect! That’s hilarious.’

  ‘She was in London and she’s a friend of his,’ Maisie says quietly.

  ‘Wouldn’t you recognize
the world-famous star of Pretty Woman and Notting Hill and a million other things if she was standing over you, watching you? This is completely stupid.’

  ‘How many of these people do you know?’

  ‘I don’t know why this is still a story,’ says Becky, affecting growing irritation.

  ‘It’s a weird thing to make up though, isn’t it? Why would you make up something like that?’ Maisie crosses her arms across her chest.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she wants to sound credible, claiming there was a witness, even if there wasn’t. That way people think they’re waiting for proof that they’ll end up getting, instead of it being what it is, which is ultimately her word against his.’

  ‘That’s, like, most rapes, isn’t it? He said, she said?’

  Becky has had versions of this conversation before. She spent six months working with a psychotherapist building up to being able to talk about sex, consent and personal safety without breaking down. She practised, like she was training for a marathon. She wants sex for her daughter to be loving or playful or fun, and safe. She doesn’t want her to feel used or discarded or belittled. She doesn’t want her daughter to feel the fear that has sat heavy on her own shoulders all these years.

  But now Becky struggles to remember those lessons as she affects to study the newspaper carefully. There is her picture – at the beginning of the second row: an old black-and-white shot, taken from an online graduation brochure for an evening class in film-making at the local university. It’s woefully out of date but up until now there’s been no reason for her picture to be on the internet at all. In this picture, her hair is shorter, her eyes less lined, her choice of clothes still resolutely teenage. The woman she is now hides behind long hair and slightly better clothes, instead of baggy clothes and walls.

  ‘God. I’ve aged badly,’ Becky says, trying for a laugh. ‘I can’t believe you’ve spent money buying this paper. You’re funding trash. This is a paper that used to publish photos of women with their tits out to help men get through the day without looking at soft porn. I’m not sure anyone should be taking lectures from this lot on women’s issues.’