by Debra Oswald
Before the jury was brought in for the start of the trial proper, a ruling on evidence needed to be made. The Crown wanted the jury to be made aware of Santino’s prior assault conviction and to hear testimony from two previous girlfriends who had gone to police, claiming he’d physically abused and threatened them. One of those young women had taken out an apprehended violence order, but neither woman had wanted to proceed with assault charges at the time. The Crown argued this showed Santino’s tendency to become explosively angry and violent when his wishes were thwarted. For the defence, Woodburn argued the incidents bore no relation to the Kendra Bartlett case. The assault conviction was for bashing a male business associate with a pool cue. The allegations by the two previous girlfriends involved slapping, punching, objects being thrown and threats of stabbing. In none of the previous scenarios had Santino threatened to throw a woman off an overpass. According to Woodburn, threatening to kill women by other methods—for example, stabbing—was not sufficiently alike to count as ‘similar fact’ evidence.
Woodburn had barely laid out this dubious argument when Burke made his ruling: the assault charge, the history of violence, none of it would be admissible in this trial. Journalists could not report any of it. The jury would hear none of it.
‘I don’t want a string of disgruntled ex-girlfriends parading through my courtroom,’ the judge said. ‘Let’s just look at the facts of the case in front of us.’
Anita saw the Crown’s barrister, Irene Pileris, slump slightly with the unwelcome surprise of the ruling. Even Woodburn looked startled for a moment, then quickly converted that expression into a knowing smile.
Pileris regrouped quickly, locking her spine back into its usual upright posture and calmly rearranging her notes.
Anita liked Irene Pileris. She was in her early fifties, smart, tiny, birdy, sinewy from cycling astonishing distances across the city. Her red bicycle helmet was tucked under the bar table, ready to be swapped with her barrister’s wig for the cycle home. Irene was methodical and unflustered rather than a showy court performer, but there was something deeply plausible about her that tended to convince jurors.
The jury filed in—six men and six women, ages ranging from mid-twenties to late sixties. All twelve looked slightly nervous, as if determined to do this properly but not sure what that involved. As the judge described their role in the weeks ahead, the jurors shifted position in their chairs. Should they cross their legs? Sit up to attention? Slouch in a more casual fashion? They moved their facial muscles awkwardly too, like people uncomfortable about being photographed. They were all self-conscious, trying to adopt the look serious jurors were supposed to have—the way Anita had seen fresh batches of jurors do in pretty much every criminal trial.
The opening statements for prosecution and defence laid out two possible narratives, like trailers for the movie the jury would be watching over the next six weeks. The Crown would tell the story of John Santino—a controlling bully and possessive partner who could not endure the idea that Kendra Bartlett would leave him. He had followed her as she attempted to escape and, in a fit of anger, threw her off the overpass with the intention of killing her. The defence narrative rested on a portrait of Kendra as a mentally unstable young woman, further unhinged by the failure of her acting dreams, who took her own life.
Every day of the trial, the new girlfriend, Brooke Lester, arrived on Santino’s arm. He made a big fuss of protecting her from jostling media, leaning his head right into the crook of her neck to murmur reassurances into her ear. She wasn’t as demonstrative with Santino as he was with her but, even so, she clung to his arm and played the loyal partner.
Anita noticed the way Brooke kept her face tilted down, so she was always looking up at people from a low angle, big green eyes peering through her blonde fringe like a nervous forest animal hiding in foliage. It was reminiscent of Princess Diana’s defenceless baby fawn pose, which had always struck Anita as disingenuous and irritating. It was easy for women to slip into such self-deprecating postures. Some years ago, Anita had noticed her own body language in photos: her head tipped slightly to one side in the pose many women adopted. The head tip said, It’s only little me. It was a woman reducing her own power in a group shot, next to suited men who would be staring directly at the camera, heads square on their thick necks. Anita had consciously trained herself not to do that head tip.
During the trial, Santino periodically turned to seek out where Brooke was sitting in the courtroom and mouthed ‘I love you’ to her. She would look up at him through her pale fringe and smile back. Anita scrutinised the faces of the jurors. Were they convinced by this or sickened by it?
The morning the forensic pathologist was on the witness stand, Anita craned her neck to catch a glimpse of Brooke’s face. What was going through that young woman’s head as she heard the pathologist describe Kendra Bartlett’s catastrophic injuries, caused by the fall from the overpass onto the road surface ten metres below and the impact of the truck that then hit her? Her skull shattered, her face pulpy and unrecognisable, her pelvis and so many other bones splintered into pieces it took the pathologist a long time to list them all.
When it was Woodburn’s chance to cross-examine the pathologist, he didn’t ask any further questions about the injuries. It wouldn’t help Santino’s case to conjure up more appalling visions in the jury’s mind. Instead, Woodburn shrank all the information about Kendra Bartlett’s battered body down to one detail: the toxicology showed she had escitalopram (sold as the antidepressant drug Lexapro) in her system. The drug was present at the level you would expect for someone taking a therapeutic dose, but that was enough for Woodburn to polish up his picture of Kendra as mentally unwell.
‘So, this poor young woman was depressed enough to be taking serious antidepressant medication,’ he intoned, offering his big sad eyes to the jury.
Anita felt the burn of rage and the urge to yell out to the jurors. Could they see what Woodburn was doing? He was co-opting the pity they felt for Kendra and dragging it sideways to support Santino’s version of the story. It was an act of embezzlement, stealing the goodwill of these twelve people, misappropriating their decent human feeling.
When the pathologist was finally excused from the stand, there was a shift in air density in the courtroom, pressure dropping a little now that the gruesome stuff was done with.
Anita had become accustomed to hearing gory forensic pathology reports in court. She’d peered at blown-up photos of victims, the kind where you needed help to discern which part of a person’s body was on display in the mangled red tissue. Since the murder of Stacey and the kids, she found she was still able to listen to such evidence. She was still able to write up the grisly information into newspaper language. But now, as her fingers were typing the words, it felt peculiar, as if they were not her hands, the mechanical process disconnected from the churning mess in her head.
Anita glanced at the journalists around her in the gallery. One guy was doing a crossword on his phone during a boring bit of the proceedings. She could see another journo’s laptop screen—the woman was toggling between the story she was writing about Kendra Bartlett’s horrendous death and the eBay page on which she was bidding for a set of garden furniture.
Anita didn’t judge their behaviour. She’d been like that herself. When you were covering long distressing trials, you had to find ways to flush the toxicity out of your system. But it couldn’t be like that for her anymore. Now there was a level of separation between Anita and the people who used to be her gang around the courtrooms. She hoped the separateness wasn’t visible to anyone.
When Justice Burke called the lunchtime adjournment on the Friday, Anita stayed in her seat, fiddling on her laptop longer than necessary, to allow time for the other journos to wander outside. The last thing she wanted to do was engage in any gossipy chat about what happened to Kendra Bartlett. She needed a little airlock of time between the courtroom and the world, time alone before she could engage with people
.
She eventually headed out of Court 3, thinking she’d find a cafe a few blocks away from the court precinct. Through the doorway to the street, she could see out to the verandah, where Rohan Mehta was in close conversation with the earnest young lawyer from the prosecution team. As one of the detectives involved in the Santino case, Rohan was slated to give evidence for the Crown and so wouldn’t be allowed in court until then.
Anita noticed that Rohan kept glancing at the doorway. Was he hoping to see her among the stream of people coming out? Was he keeping an eye out for her? She checked her own reaction—yes, she would like it if he was looking for her.
When they made eye contact, she raised her hand in a little wave. She aimed to make it the same kind of wave she would give any detective she’d met a few times and got on with, as opposed to the wave she would give a detective she’d had sex with.
Rohan smiled and took a step towards her, but then his phone rang. He looked at the caller ID, winced to Anita—Sorry, I have to answer this—and strode around the corner to take the call.
Half an hour later, when Anita walked back with a sandwich, Rohan was still on the courthouse verandah, swivelling back and forth as he talked on his phone. When he saw Anita perch on the stone wall to eat her lunch, he wound up the call and came over to sit beside her.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked.
She assumed he meant the trial.
She made a growling noise in her throat. ‘I have to sit on my hands sometimes, so I don’t launch myself across the room and smash the sharp corner of my laptop into John Santino’s evil fucking skull. Is it okay for me to say that to you?’
‘I think it’s okay,’ said Rohan.
‘Hey, I heard talk Santino was being looked at for drug charges before he decided to kill his girlfriend. Is that true?’ she asked.
‘Well, there were possible connections to serious quantities of cocaine. Lots of stuff goes through the bars he runs, for sure. And Santino himself—always known to be a big white-powder boy.’
‘He had a possession conviction way back,’ Anita said.
‘He did. And by all accounts, in the last few years he’s developed a taste for oxy and heroin too.’
‘Right. Wow. Perfect fatherhood material. Because he got bail—’
Rohan jumped in, defensive. ‘We tried to have his bail revoked. Several times.’
‘I know. I’m not blaming you guys. But because Santino’s been out on bail, he was free to spray it around and get that poor bloody woman pregnant.’
Rohan nodded, grim. ‘Lot of chat in the DPP about the pregnancy being a clever tactic.’
‘Reckon. Brooke Lester sitting in court with that huge belly is the best defence he’s got going for him. But Jesus, that poor woman. She’s so young.’
‘Twenty-three,’ Rohan confirmed.
‘So now she’s having a baby with an abusive, weapons-grade arsehole.’
‘Well, that arsehole is going to jail.’
‘Is he?’ Anita asked. ‘I mean, Burke ruled out the priors and the previous girlfriend stuff.’
Rohan puffed out a breath slowly. ‘That was annoying. Really fucking annoying. But don’t worry. We’ve still got a strong case against this guy.’
‘Good. And the prosecutor, Irene Pileris—she’s excellent value. Not a show pony, but effective.’
‘Yeah, glad we got Irene.’
There was a brief pause, enough of a pause to allow the other stuff in Anita’s mind to whoosh forward and tumble out of her mouth.
‘Listen, Rohan, I’m sorry about my cryptic texts. Awkward and confusing and—I mean, I’m supposed to be a skilled communicator but—oh …’
‘Well, yeah, you are a professional wordsmith,’ he said, deadpan.
‘Supposedly. But a wordsmith who doesn’t know how to use words clearly to another human being. Sorry.’
‘No need to apologise. My texts were clunky too.’
Anita took a breath, keen to blurt this all out in one go. ‘It’s just—look, Rohan, I like you very much and I think you’re almost certainly a really good man and I very much enjoyed the other night, but it doesn’t feel right, under the circumstances, because of the way we properly got to know each other and I think—Look, maybe when this is all over …’
‘You mean, when the coronial inquest into your friend is over?’ he asked.
They both knew that was so long off—many months, possibly years—she was effectively saying there was no chance of them pursuing anything.
Anita shrugged. She wasn’t sure about any of it.
‘Okay. I understand,’ Rohan said quietly. ‘I respect that.’
She was disappointed he didn’t argue back. But then if he had argued back, had not respected her position, she would’ve thought less of him. It was impossible.
But even as they seemed to talk themselves into a dead-end, the words didn’t entirely match the body language. Their hands had edged closer on the stone wall, close enough for the side of her finger to be leaning against his hand, and neither of them had shifted away.
‘Time for you to go,’ said Rohan.
‘Sorry?’ Anita wondered if he was sending her away.
‘Don’t you need to go back in there? Starting again at two, I believe,’ he said.
‘Oh yes. Shit. Two.’
Anita scrambled to shove the sandwich wrapper into her jacket pocket and scoop up her laptop bag to hurry inside.
‘See you,’ she said.
‘Yeah, see you.’
When the court rose at four p.m., Anita perched on a bench in the corridor to finish the day’s story for the paper and send it off. It only took her ten minutes but that was long enough for the rest of the media pack to have left the building.
When she came out onto Phillip Street, Rohan was waiting there. He was waiting for her. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
They walked through Hyde Park and then up to where Rohan’s car was parked at the Surry Hills police station, stopping by a supermarket to buy food to cook dinner at the Alexandria apartment Rohan shared with a flatmate.
His place was in a group of neat, uniform residential towers built on old industrial land, resembling a plantation forest that had sprouted in a flat paddock. Those apartment block clusters always made Anita think of an architectural sketch and she pictured herself as a line drawing of a human figure included to indicate scale and the potential of life existing in the development. Well, there were now two human figures walking through the building foyer—her and Rohan Mehta, carrying groceries and intending to have a lot of sex.
The flat was tidy and perfectly comfortable, if a little impersonal. The flatmate travelled so much for his marketing job, he was rarely there, and it was clear Rohan was really only using the facilities of the place rather than occupying it as a home.
That Friday night spilled over to the entire weekend. They stayed in bed for much of the time but did venture out for food. They also went walking, including a hike to Anita’s flat to fetch more clothes.
They fell easily into the rituals of a fresh relationship, including the traditional telling-of-the-romantic-history. Anita did her routine about the string of unfortunate men she’d chosen in her twenties, including Secretly Married Martin and The Masturbator. In her early thirties, in London, she lived for two years with an Australian guy, an intellectual property lawyer, and there’d been talk of babies and real estate back in Australia. But when she returned to Sydney, he never got around to booking a flight. Underneath all their plans, the flesh of the relationship had atrophied without them realising. They agreed to let it go.
Up until a year ago, Rohan was living with the girlfriend he met at uni and, like Anita and London-based Lawyer, they too had talked of babies and real estate. He had no clue she’d been sleeping with her old high school boyfriend for six months.
‘Does that make me a shit detective?’ he asked Anita.
‘No, no. Well, in matters of the heart maybe,’ sh
e said. ‘And you’ve got no worries about me being a secret cheater. I’m such a useless and unconvincing liar. I mean, if I try to lie, I sweat, my neck goes red and my eyeballs flick from side to side—so, you know, with me no detective work is required.’
Over the next week, Anita and Rohan spent every night together, sometimes at her place, sometimes at his. If they ran into each other around the courts during the day, they didn’t let on they were together. It was simpler that way.
Anita enjoyed drifting in the permanent state of dreamy sexual anticipation that came with a new relationship, her whole body slightly achy with lust. The speed of this thing with Rohan Mehta was giddying, but at the same time it felt surprisingly calm and harmonious. She wasn’t an infatuated girl with him, as she usually was in the early days with a new man. With Rohan, she felt like her most grown-up self. That was a new experience for Anita. A very good experience.
TEN
PAULA WAS SPENDING MORE AND MORE OF EACH DAY IN THE food court at Marrickville Metro shopping centre.
In a food court, a person could go unnoticed. A woman could sit alone at a table and no one would think anything of it. Paula kept phone earbuds in her ears so that if one of her patients recognised her, she could smile hello and pretend to be on a call.
Sometimes the smell of cooking at one of the vendors would make her bilious. The meaty odours seemed to slide into her mouth, down her throat and into her belly like a solid greasy influx her gall bladder couldn’t handle. When that happened, she would move to another section, away from whichever food smell was upsetting her.
On the other hand, hanging in the food court was also a tactic to coax herself to eat. Since Ian Ferguson, the prospect of most food made her nauseous. She couldn’t face cooking at home. She tried having food delivered, but the smell would linger in the house for hours and she’d be retching over the sink. She couldn’t order a meal in a cafe in case she couldn’t eat it and might draw attention to herself. But she discovered that in the food court she could wander between the eating options without commitment. If and when something looked appetising—a fresh juice, a tub of salad, a sandwich—she would buy it. That way she could put enough nutrition into her body to sustain herself.