The two women spread the food out on the dining table and picked at it as Anita bounced around the room, fired up to convey the satisfaction she was extracting from the trial.

‘I reckon it could give us some cathartic goodness. Seeing Kendra get some justice, publicly, it’s … I mean, we won’t ever get that for Stacey and the kids—’

‘There’ll be an inquest,’ Paula pointed out.

‘Yes. Which will be something. But Matt will never stand in a courtroom and have the truth of what he did wrap around him the way I’m seeing it wrap around John Santino.’

Paula shrugged and then nodded.

‘What I’m trying to explain—explaining this badly, sorry …’ Anita went on. ‘The point is, I could let myself be upset by this trial, I could be totally undone by it, or I can try to draw moral satisfaction from it.’

‘Hey, I’ll take whatever moral satisfaction is available on the market.’

From then on, Anita started giving Paula her own daily bonus-material reports on the Santino trial.

In his second day on the stand, Damien Ross spoke about the way Kendra had altered her appearance to please John Santino. Under pressure from her new boyfriend, she became more anxious than ever about her weight. Santino had joked to Damien about setting Kendra weight ‘goals’. If she lost three kilos by August, she would be rewarded with a trip to Hamilton Island. Before Santino, Kendra had never used much make-up and she usually wore second-hand boho dresses and Doc Martens, but her new boyfriend insisted she wear full make-up every day, high heels and sexy-corporate clothes—low-cut silk shirts and tightly tailored suits.

‘I was standing with them in the street once,’ said Damien Ross, ‘and Kendra went back to fetch something from the car. He pointed at her as she walked away from us, and he said, “Look at that, mate. Is there any better sight on the planet than a woman’s arse in a tight skirt when she’s walking in stilettos?” And then he laughed and said, “Oh no. That’s right. You don’t care because you’re a fucking fag.”’

After Anita related this bit of testimony to Paula, she spun her laptop around on the table.

‘Check out these photos of Kendra—pencil skirt, stilettos, long blonde hair blow-dried straight, heavy eyeliner. Now here are shots of the new girlfriend who comes to court with him.’

The resemblance was unmistakable, apart from Brooke Lester’s pregnant belly. Both women were in their early twenties, slim, with similar facial features and made to appear more similar thanks to their identical long straight blonde hair, heavy eyeliner, high heels and pencil skirts.