The Truth About The Things We Don't Remember

This week's '24 Hours In Police Custody' two-parter brought a common but complicated dimension of violence against women and girls to screen. What happens when we don't recall?

Jul 09, 2025

‘Nightclub Predator’ begins as events themselves began last year: with a girl in torment picking up the phone.

“I can’t even say the words. I can’t talk about it normally,” she says to the 999 operator for Cambridgeshire Police, her voice already breaking. “The first time I even hinted at it was today”. The reply, a simple question that’s owt but: “What's happened?

“Well, we went to his house. I don’t know, there’s a lot of gaps. I remember waking up and I didn’t have my clothes, when I realise that I’m bleeding. And he’s washing blood off of himself. I just don’t know what happened.”

Do you think there’s a chance you might have been raped? “Well, to be honest, yeah…It was 2022. I didn’t want to say anything because I don’t want people to not believe me.” She says his name: Craig France. And then, through cries: “I have literally never been the same since it happened. I’ve literally gone downhill so much. I really tried not to let it. I really did try not to let it, but it just slowly becomes harder and harder.”

The calls ends with a breakdown and a breakthrough. She might not know what happened but clearly knows something did. The “it” that happened, that she’s been fighting to stay afloat in defiance of for the last two years.

It. The knowledge that gnaws at your insides like a cornered rat.

Twenty years ago on a Monday morning, I made a similar call to a specialist sexual assault centre in London from my desk at work, said similar words. I think, I don’t know, maybe something happened…to me? No, I definitely think it did. I don’t know. I have, I have…bite marks?. At least, that’s how I remember it going. Memory. To paraphrase Vivian Ward: it’s a slippery little sucker.

Which is, of course, what they rely on, what they exploit, those that exploit us. Power held in the complete picture only they see. Leaving us with fragments, scattered. On our knees we gather them in our laps, however small. Hold them up to the light, seeking out truth, even as we fear it.

What I’m sure of from that Saturday night. A solo dinner, meatballs and sangria. A bar before I meet friends, early for once. A man with with a face like any other professional man’s face and hair that might be blonde talks at my left ear. God, he’s boring, I think. Where did he appear from? I look around. Don’t know why he’s talking to me. He’s objectively far more attractive than me. Bet he’s an estate agent. A nice guy, objectively. Don’t be such a bitch. I smile. Look at my phone. Tense and relax my bladder. Need a wee! Thank god for that. I pick up my handbag, other hand pausing over my drink. It’s gonna look weird if I take it. Totally unhygienic. Deffo rude. To this man I don’t want to talk to me. Fuck it, he looks normal. I pull my hand back, walk to the loo. Christ almighty, he’s still here?! I’m back. He talks, moves closer, I drink. Losing the will to live, get me out of here. I smile. Get that drink down you. Explain I’m going to meet my friends now. Bye-bye mr nice guy!

The teenagers and twenty-somethings in Peterborough’s bars and clubs didn’t appear to know that Craig France wasn’t around their age, but in his 30s. He was just like them, they thought. Fun. Harmless. Normal. Nice. Everyone said so.

A victim: “He was really friendly, funny, a really chilled-out guy.”

An investigator: “He looks like normal Joe Bloggs on the street.”

A victim: “He’s this nice guy, everyone likes him.”

A doorman: “No trouble at all.”

A victim: “You wouldn’t have expected him to do something like that.”

And until then, no-one thought he had. The CPS later seem surprised that he has no previous convictions for violence against women and girls, but as DCI Helen Tebbit says, with the knowledge of a woman who sees a Craig France day in day out, “Predators manipulate people.”

And boy, did he. He tried to stay pals, after. When challenged by the 18-year-old who’d woken up bleeding with what she calls “a big black hole” where her memory should be, he’d replied, “You wanted those things. It takes two to tango and that’s what happened, although you don’t remember it, apparently.”

Apparently.

But Craig France knew what he’d done; had committed it to film and made it verifiable fact. We, and she, then see what’s inside that black hole she’s carried for two years. The videos he shot that now play and play.

She’s in his back garden, naked apart from one sock, she stumbles and falls into the hot tub

She’s lying, not moving, on the ground next to the hot tub. He picks up her legs, which don’t appear to work, and drags her unconscious body backwards across the concrete

She’s naked, knelt down on her hands and knees in the shower

He positions the camera opposite the en suite bathroom, walks into frame, naked, then over to the toilet where he picks her up off the floor. Naked, she leans against the wall, staggers, head swaying back and forth

She’s lying on his bed, naked, her eyes closed, vomit bucket by her side, as he has has sex with her. As he rapes her

They’re videos unearthed - along with many, many others, leading to more victims being identified by police - after a second girl, just turned 18 at the time of meeting Craig France, comes forward to say she’d had sex with him, but didn’t know he was filming. “I classed him as a good friend. He seemed really nice,” she says, detailing the after-parties she’d go to at his with a gang of mates after the clubs closed. The alcohol he’d be handing over and over and over, the mornings she’d wake up in pain. Does she remember having sex with him? “I don’t remember the night at all,” she says, her knowledge of the ‘sex’ gleaned from videos Craig France sent her. “My mind is completely blank, I don’t remember one thing.”

I wake up naked, in bed, at 4:25pm the next day, a Sunday. And there’s a thick line between what I’m sure of, and remember - leaving the bar, walking down the street, meeting my friends - and what comes after that, what I’m not sure of, what I don’t.

There are flashes - colour and sensation cutting through blank space, my senses trying to reconnect brain and body. And fleeting thoughts, like arrows I glimpse as they fly overhead. My fragments.

Red disco lights hit my eyeball, head snapping back like a flip-phone opening

The feeling of wet against my jaw, slack and spread on the dancefloor

My legs don’t work. Why don’t my legs work?

I’m lying on my bed, someone’s over me, breathing. I can’t open my eyes, move any part of my body. I will an arm, my little finger into movement. Nothing. I panic. Imagine tiny weightlifters standing in formation on my waterline, pushing up my eyelids so I can see

A heaviness moves off the bed next to me. I hear limbs being pushed inside cloth, the snap of a waistband hitting skin, a belly

He’s standing stock-still, looking down at me. I know he is. Why is he still? Oh god, oh fuck, he’s going to kill me isn’t he. I start screaming but my throat is still and my mouth closed

The click of my front door closing, I breathe

The rest? A black expanse. This is what we mean when we say, “I can’t remember”. The abyss both behind and in front of us. But what I can’t remember, my body tries to tell me. When I stand up, I’m seasick, the room tilts and sways. I can’t focus my eyes, see double. I hurt, inside and out. On my legs and arms, there are bruises and scrapes. I count them: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. On my breasts, bite marks. I count those, too: one, two, three. Trace them, painted black and red, roaring in pain. On my settee, when I make it there: a man’s glove. I count it: one.

Over the hours and days that follow, I’m on my knees, collecting more pieces that still don’t complete the picture. There’s the counting by the nurse, ticking off the marks I missed, marking up the outline of a woman’s body on paper that’s meant to be mine. The bare facts from a friend: the state I’d turned up in, being unable to stand up in the club, the mini-cab I’d been put into with my address.

But, as for my own memories, two decades on, there’s nothing more to fill those gaps. And probably never was, according to a scientist I interviewed a few years later about retrieving events from a blackout. At a certain point, she told me, your brain just stops recording. There’s no memory to be found. This is, for a long time, a relief. There’s a theory: if you can’t remember what happened, then you can’t know, so can’t suffer. A theory I first heard when after a few drinks (ooh careful! Don’t wanna get assaulted again!), I didn’t so much summon enough courage but suppress enough shame to tell someone about that night. “Think yourself lucky,” she said. “You don’t know what happened, and what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Anyway, be grateful he didn’t kill you. Could have done, you know”.

No shit.

Clearly she’d never read The Body Keeps the Score. And neither had I, then. Though I already knew it by heart, as did she. Many - if not most - women I know have a story like this. Perhaps not this exact story. But yes, a story like it. A night marked by absence. What’s missing. What we don’t remember. The feeling when we wake up. There’s something, we say. Something we’ll never know. Something I’ll never know. My body healed, bruises and bite marks faded, the nightmares ended (these ones anyway). Nothing remained, remains today, that could complete the story. And very rarely does.

An increasing exception: when the men who have used our blacked-out bodies like simple objects for their convenience - a pair of shoes to be worn while doing the bins, a car to travel from home to the office - have documented it. Man-made proof that'll deliver certainty. A certainty accessed by the girls on our screens this week, and delivered to police, the courts, and - via the documentary, by the looks of an overwhelmingly supportive social media response - to the public. But one only made possible by us and them seeing, hearing, knowing how they were positioned and propped up and penetrated, made a puppet with its strings cut.

As with Madame Pelicot, this is what it takes.

And justice? After multiple complaints to police and multiple charges, before the trial began, Craig France offered to plead guilty to one charge of rape, sexual assault, voyeurism and exposure. This was accepted and he received a reduced sentence of 10 years and 7 months. Investigators believe we still don’t know the full scale of Craig France’s offending. That there are very likely more women out there who are victims.

Some will hold their fragments up to the light, some will choose to forget that there’s a hole where their memory should be. Still they join us, Those Who Don’t Remember, and stare down the black expanse.