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.