The Family Doctor

by Debra Oswald

  ‘Indeed,’ said Woodburn with an arch tip of his head. ‘You didn’t know anything about her. When you claim you saw my client holding Kendra’s arm and heard him say, “Is this what you want, you stupid bitch?”, did you—’

  ‘I definitely heard that.’

  ‘I don’t doubt for a moment, Miss Hafda, that you think that’s what you heard. But is there a chance that the scene you were observing from a distance was my client arguing with Kendra Bartlett to dissuade her from committing suicide by jumping?’

  ‘Oh well, I don’t … It didn’t look like that.’

  ‘Mm. And when you heard Kendra Bartlett say, “Let me go,” you jumped to the conclusion that she meant “Let me leave”. But couldn’t she have meant “Let me go” in the sense of “Let me jump”, “Let me die”?’

  The cross-examination went on and on, with Woodburn circling back to ask questions again, laying traps to catch Maram Hafda out, implying she was incompetent, flipping through his repertoire of smarmy noises and snorts of contempt.

  ‘I’m simply quoting something you said a few moments ago, Miss Hafda. Remind me—how close were you to the two people at this point?’

  ‘A hundred and twenty metres. He was shouting loudly, so I was close enough to—’

  ‘Ah … one of us must be confused—earlier you said a hundred metres. We can play back the tape, if you need to remember the version you told the jury a moment ago.’

  ‘Oh. No. I guess I said that.’ Maram was becoming rattled after almost an hour of this.

  ‘So which is it—a hundred metres or a hundred and twenty?’

  ‘A hundred, I guess.’

  ‘You guess.’ Woodburn snorted. ‘Mm, we’ve had a lot of guessing from you. So the moment when Kendra fell, are you sticking with your guess of fifty metres?’

  ‘Um, I don’t … um, yes.’

  Ambushed and confused, Maram threw a look of appeal to the Crown team, but she couldn’t seem to catch Hugh Warby’s eye. He was fussing with his papers, not even looking at the young woman on the stand. Anita wanted to shake him. Why aren’t you raising objections?

  Many times in situations like this, Anita had seen judges step in to protect the witness from being bullied, but Justice Burke said nothing. In fact, Roland Burke had a half-smile on his face, relishing Woodburn’s floorshow too much to curtail it.

  By the end, Anita could hear the confidence, the triumph, oozing out of every word Gilbert Woodburn spoke to Maram Hafda.

  ‘When my client saw his girlfriend fall to her death, is there a chance the sound you heard him emit was a guttural cry of anguish from the man who loved her?’

  ‘Oh. I don’t—I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know. Is it possible, Ms Hafda, that what you saw on the overpass, in the distressed state you must’ve been in—so much so that you’re now struggling to keep the details clear—I completely understand it’s difficult to be accurate—is it possible, Miss Hafda, that what you saw was a man grabbing his girlfriend because he was desperate to stop her from jumping?’

  ‘Oh, I … I guess so,’ she murmured.

  ‘Thank you. No further questions.’

  Straight after the break, there was to be a voir dire, so the jurors were held back in the jury room. Woodburn was challenging the admissibility of a piece of evidence—far too late in the proceedings for a challenge like this, but Justice Burke had agreed to it anyway.

  There’d been some back and forth about who would be allowed in the courtroom, given the sensitivity of the evidence to be discussed, and Anita was expecting the judge to close the court entirely. He finally decided that family, friends and the general public would be excluded, but the ‘ladies and gentlemen of the press’ could remain while the legal teams presented their arguments. Burke loved an audience.

  The evidence was thirty minutes of audio on a USB police had found among Kendra Bartlett’s possessions—recordings the young woman had made on her phone during the week before her death and transferred to a USB to avoid detection by Santino. The defence maintained that the recordings were inadmissible because they were made without Santino’s knowledge or consent and potentially had been faked by Kendra.

  Hugh Warby stumbled through arguments in favour of the evidence being presented to the jury. ‘The probative … ah, the probative value of … If Your Honour could excuse me a second while I find the notes on—um …’

  ‘Let’s just have a listen to some of this audio, shall we?’ suggested Burke, making no effort to conceal his contempt for Warby’s inept performance.

  When the recording began, Kendra Bartlett’s voice sliced through the air in the courtroom and hit Anita with a force she wasn’t ready for. She’d been looking at pictures of this woman, she’d been imagining her life and her death for weeks now, but hearing her voice was electrically charged at another level altogether.

  ‘Johnny, I just need some time away; I need some time to think,’ Kendra could be heard saying at the start of the section played in court.

  After that, the audio was dominated by John Santino’s voice, either sneering in a nasty little singsong tune or spitting words at her with raw aggression.

  ‘What’s that you’ve got, Kendra? Is that a backpack? Is that your little bug-out bag? Your little escape kit? You brainless fucking slut. Did you honestly fucking think you could sneak off and I wouldn’t know?’

  As Santino continued hectoring her, you could still hear Kendra’s voice, but faintly, as she tried to appeal to him.

  ‘What? What? I can’t hear you!’ he bellowed at her. ‘You don’t get to decide to walk out on me. I’ve put money into you. I’ve spent my money on all your shit. That makes you my investment property. My investment property can’t decide to walk out my door and go off to play with her little fag friend. Fuck me, sometimes you shit me so much, I can’t stand to look at you one second longer—but I’m the one who decides if and when you go, okay? Okay?’

  By this point Kendra was barely audible. Anita could just make out the sound of her crying and her voice, thin and friable, pleading, ‘Please, Johnny. Please, baby, let me go.’

  She was mostly drowned out by Santino ranting. ‘Kendra, if you ever try to sneak off, you won’t be hard to find—on account of you’re as dumb as a box of hammers. I will find you and I will throw you off the tallest building in this city or—hey, I know, maybe I should cut your stupid fucking throat so I don’t have to listen to your whiny fucking voice one second longer.’

  As the audio played, Santino kept his head down, eyes fixed on his shoes, but his voice filled the courtroom, making every particle of the air vibrate with dark energy.

  Anita was breathing too rapidly, tipping close to a panic attack. At the same time as she sat listening to Kendra’s tape, her mind was replaying the phone video of Stacey pleading with Matt. And as two women pleaded for their lives, here was Anita paralysed in her seat, useless. She couldn’t do anything for Stacey or Kendra. She couldn’t do anything for either of them.

  Anita was still so light-headed from hyperventilating that when the recording ended and the barristers put forward their arguments, the words were indecipherable to her.

  When Justice Burke announced his decision, his voice seemed muffled, as if the sound had to push through viscous air in the courtroom to reach her.

  Burke ruled for the defence. The recording had been made without consent and could have been doctored. It would not be admissible.

  Anita forced herself to sit very still, head in her hands, hoping her dizziness would settle. The three journalists near her in the gallery were whispering to each other, but Anita kept her head down.

  None of the journalists would be permitted to report on anything they’d heard during the voir dire, but not one of them could unhear that audio. If they’d held any scrap of doubt about Santino’s guilt—if only to maintain the storytelling interest in the trial, holding out for a narrative twist or whatever—that was gone now.

  The young female journ
o sitting next to Anita nudged her and pointed out Brooke Lester, who was walking back into the courtroom along with other spectators.

  The jurors were then escorted back into court through a side door. Anita watched as each juror resumed their seat. They would make their decision about John Santino without ever hearing that audio.

  FOURTEEN

  PAULA COULD SEE ANITA WAS WINDING HERSELF UP INTO one of her agitated states. Ever since they were teenagers, she had been the one to coax Anita to dial back her escalating anxiety about whatever she was fixating on and steer her away from doing something foolish. It was a pattern they were both familiar with. A running joke even. Sometimes Anita would be resentful, feel patronised by Paula, but mostly she said she was grateful.

  The two friends had agreed to go for a Sunday walk along the coastal path from Coogee. Anita had suggested this activity, explaining, ‘I’ve been sitting on my arse in that courtroom for so many weeks, my leg muscles will waste away if I don’t stomp in weight-bearing mode for at least ten kilometres.’

  Sometimes Paula found the Bondi and Coogee area unappealing, almost harsh—mostly treeless hillsides covered in squat, unlovely apartment blocks, swathes of concrete, with a few patches of stunted salty vegetation. But then she would turn her head and the ravishing beauty of the ocean would gazump all of that.

  Paula and Anita walked for an hour, then stopped for a sandwich in a cafe along the route. But as Anita talked nonstop about the Santino case, her fervour was ratcheting up, too loud and too intense for the crowded communal space of a coastal cafe on a bright Sunday afternoon.

  ‘Just take a breath,’ Paula advised her.

  ‘You’re right. Yes. Sorry. I’m talking too loudly. Are people looking at me—“Why is that woman so fucking loud?” Am I being too loud?’

  ‘Maybe a bit.’

  ‘Let’s scurry out of here. You’ve finished eating, haven’t you?’

  They resumed their walk, following the curve of the beach, with Anita striding along, burning up some of her excess voltage. But she continued talking, barely pausing to breathe between words.

  She ranted to Paula about the sixty-something male GP who had testified as part of the defence case. This doctor had prescribed antidepressants to Kendra Bartlett when she was brought to see him by Santino’s sister Marina. He had asked Kendra only a handful of questions—most of which Marina answered on her behalf—and then he wrote her a prescription for Lexapro.

  ‘Is he allowed to do that?’ Anita asked. ‘I mean, he sees Kendra one time and he can pump her full of happy pills?’

  The doctor’s negligence frustrated Paula as much as it did Anita, but she wasn’t entirely surprised—guys like that were out there. ‘Look, I can’t explain exactly what that doctor was thinking.’

  ‘No, I know. Sorry. You’re not responsible for every GP in the country. Although—sidebar—things would work much better in our nation if you were running everything. And really, it’s Marina: she’s the dodgy character in that scene.’

  Anita gave Paula a run-down on Marina’s performance on the witness stand during the week, acting out the testimony in character, conveying Marina’s motherly protectiveness towards Santino, even though she was several years his junior.

  ‘My brother is a very loving person,’ Marina had declared. ‘Johnny can lose his temper sometimes but it’s only ever verbal, never physical. My brother is a gentleman with women. He’s always fallen for his girlfriends with—I guess you’d say with blind devotion. Oh, but it’s not like I’m saying Kendra wasn’t a lovely girl. She was really sweet. I adored her.’

  Marina presented herself as the person Kendra confided in about her anxieties and, eventually, her suicidal thoughts. Marina spoke, with a lyrical sadness, about how fragile Kendra had become.

  ‘If my brother is guilty of anything, he’s guilty of believing his love could save Kendra. He loved her too much to face how mentally unwell she was, until it was too late,’ Marina said directly to the jury, dabbing a few tears from the edges of her eye make-up.

  ‘Do you reckon Marina knows he killed her?’ Paula asked.

  ‘I think about that all the time when I watch her up there on the stand,’ Anita replied. ‘She must realise. But she loves her brother. And there’s a great big concrete slab of loyalty there.’

  ‘People can refuse to face a thing. They can choose not to face it as an act of will.’

  Anita wasn’t really listening to Paula; she was winding herself up into a state again.

  ‘Fuck their family solidarity bullshit. They’re all lying to paint Kendra as a suicidal nutcase. Santino killed her and now … oh … I mean, it’s stupefying to sit in that court and watch how quickly the prosecution is crumbling to pieces.’

  ‘The defence barrister—he’s obviously clever,’ said Paula.

  ‘Oh yes, the man is an evil wizard. Woodburn gathers up all the evidence that shows Santino is guilty and then uses his sorcerer alchemy to transmute it into evidence she killed herself.’

  ‘What does Rohan say about the way the case is going?’

  Anita shrugged. ‘When I ask, he goes quiet and weird with me. So then I worry he thinks it’s inappropriate for me to talk to him about it. Professionally inappropriate, I mean. Or maybe he thinks it’s unhealthy for our relationship to bring this toxic stuff into it. Do you reckon that’s what he thinks?’

  ‘I don’t know. Ask him.’

  ‘If I push—“Come on, what do you think is going to happen?”—he says, “The jurors aren’t crazy.” Which is probably right, don’t you reckon?’

  ‘I guess so. I don’t know enough about how it works.’

  ‘Then again—fuck … the jury don’t know any of Santino’s prior history, they didn’t hear the audio. Marina’s a good performer on the stand, plus Hugh Warby’s making a hash of everything.’ Anita abruptly stopped on the walking path and pressed her hand against her lips as if to prevent the words coming out of her mouth. ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there’s a chance Santino might get off.’

  Paula felt a flush of panic wash through her chest as she recalled the news footage she’d seen of Brooke Lester outside the court building. Brooke arriving on John Santino’s arm, one hand on her eight-months-pregnant belly, as if her small hand could shield her baby from the TV crews and the noise and the hazardous energy that bristled around the courthouse.

  It was clear that Anita’s thoughts had also gone straight to Brooke. ‘Did I tell you I’ve seen Brooke Lester’s parents?’

  ‘Oh. Do they come to the trial with her?’

  ‘No. They stay outside. I didn’t know who they were to start with. Last week, this couple started appearing across the road from the court building. One of the camera guys told me who they were. Trish and Rob Lester.’

  ‘Does Brooke talk to them?’

  ‘No, that’s the thing. She won’t even look at them. One day I saw the mother call out something, but Brooke turned away. Pointedly turned away.’

  ‘Shunned them?’

  ‘That’s what it looked like, yeah,’ said Anita. ‘And Marina glared at them as if they’re the enemy.’

  ‘What did the parents do?’

  Anita shook her head. ‘Just stood there looking shattered. They’ve turned up every day since then but Brooke never acknowledges them.’

  At home on her own, Paula had been playing and replaying news footage of Brooke Lester outside the court, pausing on any shot that offered a glimpse of her face. The young woman was so guarded, it was hard to read much into her expression. She was clearly nervous, but then again, anyone would be tense in the face of all the media commotion. And a pregnant woman who thought her partner might go to jail would be in an edgy state. All of that might explain her frightened manner. She might not be afraid of her boyfriend. But she might be. If Brooke was estranged from her parents, she would be bound more tightly into the Santino family, however the trial turned out.

  Paula and Anita resumed walking. By now they w
ere almost at the end of the beach section. Paula was so absorbed, trailing after thoughts about Brooke that it took her a moment to register that Anita was sniffing back tears.

  Paula clasped her friend’s hand. ‘Are you okay? What are you thinking?’

  Anita gulped, then brushed away tears with her free hand. ‘She nearly got away—Kendra. He’d trapped her, worn her down, but she dredged up enough confidence to make the decision to get out. She had cash, she escaped his apartment, made contact with her friend. She nearly made it. She was almost safe.’

  The two friends walked back up the steps towards the car park, each with an arm around the other’s waist.

  Anita had to slide further along the bench seat to make room for the extra spectators showing up in Court 3 during the last days of the trial.

  Because her testimony was completed, Marina Santino was permitted inside the courtroom now. She stuck close to Brooke like a combination of attentive carer and prison guard. Even from two rows behind, Anita could hear the hissing sound as Marina whispered a stream of commentary into Brooke’s ear.

  Up the back of the public area—in the I’m-not-sure-I’m-allowed-to-be-here seats—Anita recognised a few individuals who had testified for the Crown earlier in the trial. The tradesman who’d fixed the bathroom door on the morning Kendra died was there. On the witness stand, he’d been upset and regretful; perhaps that was why he felt an obligation to be here now. Anita also spotted two young women from Kendra’s first Sydney share house and the former manager who had employed her at Santino’s bar. Anita was heartened to see them there—at least there were people in that courtroom who cared about Kendra, who carried memories of her as a lively young woman.

  Right up the back, she saw the milky-pale figure of Damien Ross. He sat very still, listening as if his unwavering focus was crucial to the outcome, as if he could save Kendra by paying vigilant attention. Anita swivelled her upper body around and tried to catch his eye, but Damien didn’t notice. Why should he? She was just one of the pack of journalists assembled there, tapping out his dead friend’s story on their laptops.