Day two of Rodean v Rodean was Christine Fairbrother’s finest hour, the pinnacle of her career, her redemption in the eyes of the legal profession and almost guaranteed to elevate her to Queen’s Counsel before the year was out.

Christine walked through the hordes of furious fans outside the RCJ with Jessica by her side, their heads held high, ignoring the screams of abuse, not seeing the obscenities on placards waved above the sea of angry heads. They disappeared into the building just as Rocky arrived, scribbling a few desultory autographs, scowling when he usually smiled, eventually telling a particularly insistent fan who had followed him faithfully for forty years to ‘fuck off and get a life’. This did not go down well, and for the rest of the morning the crowd melted away like slush in a thaw.

Observers in the court found the next few hours painful in the extreme. Christine brought witnesses to attest to Rocky’s regular infidelities and dangerous taste for young flesh. She cited instances of his violent treatment of women, establishing a pattern through his three previous marriages. When it came to the vexed question of money, and how much Jessica deserved as a settlement, Christine traced Rocky’s downward career path through the eighties and early nineties, then read out press coverage of his shocking affair with the then Jessica Winters, ex-girl-band singer, occasional TV presenter and celeb mag fixture, who was then twenty-five years old. She demonstrated how Rocky’s media profile had shot up in the wake of the affair, how he released a single that went straight to number one – his first top ten hit for twelve years – and how he enjoyed massive back catalogue sales for the next three years, as he divorced Wife Number Three and married Jessica, Wife Number Four. Since that reversal of fortune, for which, Christine argued, Jessica was entirely responsible, Rocky had toured all over the world, appeared on chatshows, written a book and even tried out cars for Top Gear. And what did Jessica get in return? Heartbreak, black eyes and her nose rubbed in her husband’s borderline paedophile affairs.

Jessica, well trained by her counsel, kept her remarks short and factual. She remained calm under cross-examination. Every time she felt the urge to open her big mouth and have a pop at Rocky, she thought of the line of zeros on the settlement cheque, and kept her mouth shut. This was a technique that Christine had used before on vengeful wives; it never failed.

At the end of the second day, in defiance of the odds, in defiance of the press and of ‘the people’, whose favourite Rocky had so long been, the judge found in favour of Jessica Rodean – or, as she would henceforth be known, particularly on the cover of her tell-all autobiography, Jessica Winters.