I pulled my jacket tighter around me. Maybe it was this case. Maybe it was pursuing another sex offender. Or maybe I was just tired and let my guard down, but I didn’t resist when thoughts of Gemma came to mind. Perhaps in this beautiful place, I could find peace with what happened.

She had come into the Brunswick CIB every day for a week following the rape. In a quiet interview room, we pieced together her nightmare minute by minute. She vacillated between furious, tearful, adamant and second-guessing herself. Noah Shepherd suffered none of this pendulum of emotions. He was the only one sure about what happened that night. He had done nothing wrong. She must have consented because he did it to her and she let him.

Why did she let him? It was the question Gemma asked herself over and over. Why didn’t she run? Or punch? Or fight? She wrestled with this every time we sat together to work on her statement.

‘I just froze,’ she said. ‘I was in the park, alone with him. It happened so fast. I just froze.’

‘The defence are going to ask about consent,’ I told her, knowing that she was going to be put through the wringer on the stand.

Gemma’s eyes flashed with vehemence. ‘I did not consent to what that bastard did to me. He took my virginity, for God’s sake. Who would choose for it to happen like that?’

‘I know,’ I said softly. The unfairness solid as stone.

I pictured Noah Shepherd with his handsome face and condescending lawyers and his doting parents. I hated them all for protecting him from the consequences of what he had done to Gemma. I hated that he had treated Gemma like an object to poke and pose however he wanted. I hated that he had not for one second thought about her and what she might have wanted, that he hadn’t considered her at all in the transaction. Her pleasure meant as little to him as her consent. In the weeks after the attack, I had interviewed Gemma’s circle of friends. They all described a very different girl from the one I had met. His five minutes of pleasure—or power, or dominance, or whatever the hell went through a guy’s mind when he did this—had left her a shell of who she had been.

When her statement was done and Shepherd had been charged, Gemma kept coming in. Not daily, but often enough for the barista at the cafe across the road from the police station to begin our orders the minute we stepped through the doorway. Hers was a cappuccino. Mine was a latte with chocolate on the top.