Twenty-four hours later, Anita got the heads-up that a verdict was imminent. Walking into Court 3, she saw Trish and Rob Lester sitting in the corner and she nodded to them in greeting. Damien Ross was there, in his usual spot near the door, and Brooke was back in the courtroom, wedged between Marina and one of the Santino cousins.

The jury filed back in. The instant Anita saw two of the female jurors crying and several of the others looking at their shoes, sheepish and awkward, she guessed the result.

The foreman was a man in his fifties, square-bodied and square-headed. The muscles under the skin of his jawline were tensing in a combative rhythm, ready for an argument.

When the foreman pronounced the words, ‘Not guilty’, Anita heard an agonised wheezing sound behind her. Without needing to turn and look, she knew it was Damien Ross.

Murmured conversation bubbled through the courtroom, but cutting loudly across all of it was Marina’s braying voice repeating, ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

John Santino was crying, blowing kisses to his jubilant family. His emotional display was punctuated a couple of times by a strange vocalisation—a grunting ‘ha’ of satisfaction. Exactly like the sound the eyewitness had recalled when Kendra Bartlett fell from the overpass.

Hugh Warby appeared to be disappointed, ashamed, but unsurprised. Gilbert Woodburn looked smug, but rather tired. Even though he shook hands with John Santino, he broke contact with his client as soon as he politely could and busied himself with collecting up his folders. Anita liked to imagine Woodburn felt a tiny bit regretful, maybe a tiny bit grubby, for using his powers to release this dangerous creature back into the world. But probably not. And anyway, that was the system they worked in and the barrister had just been doing his job.

Anita stayed in her seat to watch Santino stride out of Court 3, with Marina on one arm and Brooke hooked in close on the other side. Brooke maintained a fixed smile, almost robotic, as if she was somehow mentally distant from this moment. It was impossible to read her expression with any certainty.

As the trio walked close to where Brooke’s parents were sitting, Anita couldn’t quite hear but she could see Trish Lester bleating, ‘Brooke. Sweetheart, talk to us. Please. Brooke.’

Santino swept the pregnant young woman away like a prize he’d won, and that was when Brooke’s mother dissolved into shuddering tears, slumping forward as if all her vertebrae had come apart. Rob Lester had to hold her upright on the bench.

Damien Ross sat near the exit and kept his eyes pinned on Santino, holding the man to account with the fierceness of his gaze. Santino turned his head and, for a brief moment, he smirked at Damien. He smirked.