EIvira Pugh had been in court many times, researching her crime novels that were so popular – although she had preferred to attend courts outside London – learning her craft. She knew very well that a rape trial – no matter the hype surrounding it, no matter the press benches full to bursting, no matter the woman in pink and the still handsome man with the greying hair and the piercing blue eyes sitting in the long lonely dock at the back of the courtroom – she knew that a rape trial is always ugly: degrading for the complainant and the defendant, both. It is bald and ugly and cold. Actions are described clinically; medical and forensic evidence is impassively given, passion or sex or lust or rage are long absent, months later, from the men in wigs describing vaginas and penises and positions and bodily fluids.

Elvira had tried hard to warn Terence.

‘It will be horrible darling,’ she had said.

‘I’m innocent,’ he answered and he had shrugged his good shoulder in a kind of stoic resignation.

It is hard for a member of the public to get a seat in the public gallery during a popular or notorious trial at the Old Bailey; Terence’s trial, the most notorious of them all, was no exception. The lady in the scarf and the snow-boots (Karen Williams, 58) was there at dawn every morning of the first week even though the trial didn’t begin each day until 10.30 am. Izzy Fields came one morning on her bicycle through the snow, hoping to catch some of the trial before she went to her matinée, but the court was full. Only Elvira was somehow able to arrive just before the public gallery was opened and get in. She had told one of the ushers she was Terence’s ex-wife, he recognised her anyway, from the newspapers. ‘Come and see me every morning love,’ he had said, ‘I’ll keep a seat for you.’

So Elvira was there every day: impassive, beautifully and expensively dressed in Italian clothes, smelling of Chanel No 5, an unusual perfume up the concrete steps to Courtroom Number 10. She always sat at the end of the front row, saw the bailed Terence Blue – with whom she and Stu would have had breakfast in Berkshire some hours before, but people did not know this – brought by a uniformed guard each day through a padded door behind which she could glimpse more bleak concrete steps and a liftwell. Each evening, the press saw, a car was waiting for her, and she was gone. And Terence was in a taxi that disappeared into the rush-hour traffic.

Everyone in court seemed to have a cold, not just Karen Williams (58) who carried a box of tissues: the woman judge sucked throat pastilles, the court stenographer sneezed, the voice of the prosecution lawyer, Mr Lee, was thick and deep with accumulated phlegm.