Maram rang 000 to report what was happening, then moved closer, considering how to intervene. A moment later, she saw Santino lift Kendra up, shove her over the low railing and let her fall onto the roadway. He leaned over the edge to look down and made a ‘ha’ noise of triumph.

Hugh Warby finished his questions, then plonked his weight heavily into the chair. He let out an embarrassingly obvious sigh of relief which he then converted into an unconvincing fake cough. However clumsily, Warby had extracted what he needed from the young woman’s testimony, which was unequivocal and so damning that Gilbert Woodburn would have to work hard to subvert it.

‘Miss Hafda,’ said Woodburn in his most unctuous voice, ‘what a horrible scene you witnessed by chance, when you were simply going about your day. My sympathy. That must’ve been a very upsetting sight to see. Was it?’

‘Oh,’ Maram responded, not expecting this. ‘Yes, it was.’

‘My goodness, I’m sure it was. Your head must’ve been spun around by such an upsetting scenario. Do you think there’s a chance you, in your distress, got little bits and bobs of detail wrong?’

‘If you mean—no, I remember pretty clearly.’

‘Pretty clearly?’

‘Very clearly. Because it was so horrible, the memory is clear.’

Woodburn nodded but then did a stagey little frown. ‘But from that distance, could you be sure what you were seeing?’

‘I was only a hundred metres away. And after I rang triple zero, I moved closer. Maybe only fifty metres away.’

‘Did you know Kendra Bartlett was on antidepressant medication?’

‘Uh, no,’ Maram answered, puzzled to be asked this. ‘I just saw a woman on the overpass. I didn’t know anything about her.’

‘Indeed,’ said Woodburn with an arch tip of his head. ‘You didn’t know anything about her. When you claim you saw my client holding Kendra’s arm and heard him say, “Is this what you want, you stupid bitch?”, did you—’

‘I definitely heard that.’

‘I don’t doubt for a moment, Miss Hafda, that you think that’s what you heard. But is there a chance that the scene you were observing from a distance was my client arguing with Kendra Bartlett to dissuade her from committing suicide by jumping?’

‘Oh well, I don’t … It didn’t look like that.’

‘Mm. And when you heard Kendra Bartlett say, “Let me go,” you jumped to the conclusion that she meant “Let me leave”. But couldn’t she have meant “Let me go” in the sense of “Let me jump”, “Let me die”?’

The cross-examination went on and on, with Woodburn circling back to ask questions again, laying traps to catch Maram Hafda out, implying she was incompetent, flipping through his repertoire of smarmy noises and snorts of contempt.