‘Ha. I’ll tell Rohan you likened him to a deceased donor liver.’

Paula laughed. ‘Don’t tell him that!’

‘No, I will. He’ll like it.’

For the rest of the meal, the two friends talked about Anita’s new relationship, gushing like teenagers, giggling until they were snort-laughing like old times, as if Stacey hadn’t been killed and Paula hadn’t murdered a man.

ELEVEN

IRENE PILERIS HAD CHOSEN TO OPEN THE CROWN CASE IN the Santino trial with the forensic pathology evidence about Kendra Bartlett’s injuries. In screen drama terms, it was like a flash-forward scene to the grisly denouement—designed to shock the jurors into confronting the crime they were here to consider. Then Pileris took the jury back, to lead them chronologically through the narrative of how Kendra found herself on that overpass.

First, Kendra’s mother was on the stand. She was forty-four but looked older, with dog-tired eyes and brittle hair dyed too luridly red for her sallow complexion. At the same time, she came across as much younger than a woman in her forties, shifting nervously on the witness stand like a teenager hauled up to face the school principal.

Through a series of gentle questions, Pileris elicited the story of Kendra growing up in various places around Tasmania. The mother was candid about her own struggles with alcohol and described her daughter as well-behaved—‘a goody-goody really’—and by necessity a self-reliant girl. Even as a schoolkid, Kendra looked after the house and held down a part-time job.

When Kendra was nineteen, there was a falling-out over her mother’s latest boyfriend. (‘He was not a good man,’ the mother conceded.)

Kendra left Hobart and travelled to Sydney to pursue her ambition to be an actor. For the next three years, there was little contact between mother and daughter, but Kendra would send a message once a month, reliably, to say she was okay.

‘She was still annoyed with me, but she didn’t want me to worry. She was a very thoughtful person.’

Finally, Pileris prompted the mother to describe the day the police called to say Kendra had died. The woman’s face crumpled like a scrap of paper and there was a doleful silence in the court for the moments it took her to collect herself. She refused the offer of a break from testifying, and after a few more simple questions, Irene Pileris expressed her personal sympathy and then handed the witness over to the defence.

Anita was surprised at the toughness of Woodburn’s cross-examination of Kendra’s mother. It obviously suited his defence narrative to characterise this woman as a bad mother who’d driven her daughter to depression and suicide. In particular, he badgered her to admit that Kendra had been obsessed with losing weight.