‘I’m simply quoting something you said a few moments ago, Miss Hafda. Remind me—how close were you to the two people at this point?’

‘A hundred and twenty metres. He was shouting loudly, so I was close enough to—’

‘Ah … one of us must be confused—earlier you said a hundred metres. We can play back the tape, if you need to remember the version you told the jury a moment ago.’

‘Oh. No. I guess I said that.’ Maram was becoming rattled after almost an hour of this.

‘So which is it—a hundred metres or a hundred and twenty?’

‘A hundred, I guess.’

‘You guess.’ Woodburn snorted. ‘Mm, we’ve had a lot of guessing from you. So the moment when Kendra fell, are you sticking with your guess of fifty metres?’

‘Um, I don’t … um, yes.’

Ambushed and confused, Maram threw a look of appeal to the Crown team, but she couldn’t seem to catch Hugh Warby’s eye. He was fussing with his papers, not even looking at the young woman on the stand. Anita wanted to shake him. Why aren’t you raising objections?

Many times in situations like this, Anita had seen judges step in to protect the witness from being bullied, but Justice Burke said nothing. In fact, Roland Burke had a half-smile on his face, relishing Woodburn’s floorshow too much to curtail it.

By the end, Anita could hear the confidence, the triumph, oozing out of every word Gilbert Woodburn spoke to Maram Hafda.

‘When my client saw his girlfriend fall to her death, is there a chance the sound you heard him emit was a guttural cry of anguish from the man who loved her?’

‘Oh. I don’t—I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know. Is it possible, Ms Hafda, that what you saw on the overpass, in the distressed state you must’ve been in—so much so that you’re now struggling to keep the details clear—I completely understand it’s difficult to be accurate—is it possible, Miss Hafda, that what you saw was a man grabbing his girlfriend because he was desperate to stop her from jumping?’

‘Oh, I … I guess so,’ she murmured.

‘Thank you. No further questions.’

Straight after the break, there was to be a voir dire, so the jurors were held back in the jury room. Woodburn was challenging the admissibility of a piece of evidence—far too late in the proceedings for a challenge like this, but Justice Burke had agreed to it anyway.

There’d been some back and forth about who would be allowed in the courtroom, given the sensitivity of the evidence to be discussed, and Anita was expecting the judge to close the court entirely. He finally decided that family, friends and the general public would be excluded, but the ‘ladies and gentlemen of the press’ could remain while the legal teams presented their arguments. Burke loved an audience.