The Family Doctor

by Debra Oswald

  Paula nodded with exaggerated gravitas. ‘Yes, that’s what I really came here to tell you.’

  ‘Then, hurrah! Good on you!’ Anita laughed and then swerved into a jokingly worried tone. ‘Ooh, but hold on a minute … Is murdering patients—even the truly nasty ones—is that considered ideal practice under the Hippocratic oath, Dr Kaczmarek?’

  ‘No. I believe it’s generally frowned upon.’

  ‘I mean, it’s probably okay just this once. But don’t you go murdering any more patients.’

  ‘I won’t. Ian Ferguson’s my one and only. The process is too stressful.’

  ‘I can imagine. Although, now I think about it, let’s not be too hasty. There are a lot of deadshits cluttering up the world. You could go through your patient files, make a list of all the violent, dangerous men and then …’

  Paula shook her head, mock earnest. ‘The connection to me would be too obvious. One murder per practice is all you can reasonably get away with.’

  ‘Point taken,’ said Anita.

  The share platters they’d ordered finally arrived. Paula used the opportunity to look away and focus on spooning food onto their plates.

  It was a relief to hear her friend approved, in theory, of what she’d done. Of course, if Anita knew the truth—that this murder was real, not a joke, not a hypothetical act—she would feel differently. And it wasn’t fair to burden Anita with that knowledge.

  Another thought crystallised in Paula’s mind: it wouldn’t be beneficial to do anything that might overturn the new peace Rochelle and her son had found. A confession, a murder investigation and the resulting publicity would bring more distress to that fragile little family.

  Paula certainly felt the weight of what she’d done. She felt the wrongness of it inside like a large tumour pressing on vital organs. She would never do something like this again, but at least some good had come from her criminal act. And no good could come from admitting it. If that meant she had to carry the weight of it inside her alone, then that was how it had to be.

  She realised that Anita was gazing at her, watching her eat. Paula was suddenly aware that she’d been shovelling food in ravenously.

  ‘Oh honey,’ said Anita, smiling with deep affection, ‘it’s good to see you looking happier. And eating. I’ve been worried about you.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m okay.’

  ‘Yeah, well, seeing the way you’re ploughing through this meal, my theory is that for the last few weeks you were just really fucking hungry.’

  Paula laughed and made a show of wolfing down the food like a person who hadn’t eaten for weeks.

  Anita cleared her throat pointedly. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

  ‘Sure—as long as I can keep gorging myself as I listen,’ Paula joked.

  Anita made a ‘please continue’ gesture and said, ‘I’ve got involved with a man. It’s become serious pretty quickly.’

  ‘Oh! Oh, Anita, that’s brilliant! I’m so, so glad.’

  ‘It’s Rohan Mehta.’ Anita looked hesitant, clearly anxious about how Paula would react.

  Paula took a moment to absorb this. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Rohan’s the detective who—’

  ‘Yes. I know who he—he seems like a really lovely—’

  ‘He is. He’s lovely,’ said Anita. ‘But I know it’s weird, because of the connection to Stacey. So I understand if you feel … I don’t know … weird about it.’

  ‘No. No,’ Paula said firmly, then smiled. She did feel a little weird about it, but mostly she felt delighted. ‘I’m really happy. And to the extent there’s a connection to Stace, it’s kind of wonderful to think that something good has come out of something horrible.’

  Anita grinned, obviously relieved.

  ‘Do you understand what I mean?’ Paula asked. ‘This is a good outcome—like organ donation after someone’s died in a car accident.’

  ‘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.

  The mother was rattled by his relentless questions about the dieting, until she finally cried out, ‘Kendra was never anorexic when she lived with me! Is that what you’re trying to make me say? She wasn’t!’

  Woodburn turned to the jury then and raised his eyebrows. Gilbert Woodburn was seventy-two but in his facial expressions, in the way he held himself, it was possible to visualise the sixteen-year-old he had once been: the smarty-pants third speaker on the debating team at a posh school. Back then, and still, he believed he was the cleverest person in any gathering.

  As he continued to bully Kendra’s mother on the stand, reducing her to tearful, stammering replies, Anita checked the reaction of the jurors. For many of the twelve, at least half of them, their faces were twisted into looks of disapproval, uncomfortable about watching the defence barrister humiliate and demolish a bereaved woman. Woodburn had misread his audience. He’d fucked up. Which was hugely satisfying.

  As the trial days rolled on, Anita’s loathing of Gilbert Woodburn, Justice Burke and John Santino held her in a state of constant simmering anger. That anger was strangely welcome. It was bracing, invigorating enough to keep despair at bay.

  Pileris continued Kendra’s story through testimony from friends she’d made in her early days in Sydney: a flatmate, the photographer who took her acting headshots, colleagues from various jobs. Each witness added scraps that formed a coherent
portrait of Kendra as an energetic, kind-hearted, naive, determinedly optimistic young woman.

  A former assistant manager from John Santino’s Darlinghurst bar described Kendra’s first shift working there. Santino had spotted the new, pretty twenty-one-year-old serving behind the bar and he’d ‘swooped’ on her, ‘serving up all his charm’.

  The next witness, Kendra’s friend Damien Ross, was expected to be on the stand for at least two days, possibly more, so Anita was especially curious to watch him sworn in.

  Damien Ross was twenty-four, tall, slender, with a stylish haircut and clothes. His strawberry blond hair and overall creamy paleness—eyes, skin, even his eyelashes—gave him an unusual kind of beauty.

  Irene Pileris guided him through the standard who-are-you bit. Damien explained he’d grown up in Perth, completing an arts degree there before moving to Sydney. He began attending part-time acting classes the same day Kendra Bartlett enrolled at the drama school. These days, he was having some success as an actor, with several television roles so far, as well as performing in fringe theatre. To supplement his acting income, he worked occasional shifts in a call centre for a wine merchant.

  Damien Ross looked nervous on the stand—you rarely saw a first-time court witness who wasn’t—but it became clear to Anita that this guy wasn’t lacking confidence. It was more that he was keyed up, determined to do right by his dead friend. From time to time, during his long hours in the witness box, he stretched his long, pale neck and shook the tension out of his limbs, like an athlete keeping calm and focused at the start of a major race. He was there to honour Kendra Bartlett.

  Damien and Kendra had become enthusiastic friends, devoted to each other from that first day in class. Both were new to the city, with no support system, broke, lonely. Both were juggling casual jobs to pay for acting classes and planning to audition for the big ‘proper’ drama schools later in the year.

  ‘Was this a romantic or sexual relationship?’ asked Irene Pileris.

  ‘No. I’m gay. We were good friends,’ Damien Ross answered.

  ‘And you would describe your friendship as close?’

  ‘Yes, very close,’ he confirmed. ‘We texted or called each other several times a day. Saw each other pretty much every day. Because we were both blond and pale, we had a running joke that we were secretly Norwegian brother and sister. We shared everything—money, secrets. We even shared energy, if that makes sense. I mean, if I was having a shaky time, Kendra would love me up, boost my confidence, you know? And then I’d do the same for her other times. We looked after each other. But it was fun—we were always teasing each other, being silly, creating wild fantasies about what we’d do in the future.’

  ‘So, would you have described Kendra as a happy person when you first met her?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I mean, she was sad sometimes. Things were difficult with her mum and she worried about making it as an actor. She fretted about her weight sometimes—I mean, actors have to, that’s the reality—but the main thing was, Kendra always lived healthy. It was one of the things we had in common. Both of us had alcoholic parents, so we didn’t drink or do drugs. But, look, yes, Kendra was happy. If you met her, you would say, “Oh, that girl is so vibrant!”’

  Damien described the day Kendra pirouetted into class having met John Santino the night before. She was dizzy from the intense and flattering courtship by her new boss. She didn’t care that the guy was fifteen years older. The relationship progressed very fast, with Kendra moving in to Santino’s apartment three weeks after their first meeting.

  Pileris asked Damien Ross, ‘When did you first meet John Santino?’

  ‘One night, I went to a bar he owned, the one where Kendra worked. I was sitting on a bar stool, chatting to Kendra. She was due to finish her shift in half an hour and we were going out to catch up. We must’ve been laughing about something because behind me I hear, “What’s so fucking funny, mate?” Really aggro voice.’

  ‘And this was the accused, John Santino?’

  ‘Yes. He grabbed me by the shoulder and said, “Getting a good fucking eyeful of my girlfriend’s tits, are you?” He was making a fist with his other hand and the veins on his temples were bulging. The guy was ropable. I thought for sure he was going to hit me. Kendra quickly explained who I was and he calmed down. He told me he hated men staring at her in the bar. He was okay with me because I was gay.’

  Soon after that night in the bar, Santino persuaded Kendra to give up work entirely.

  ‘He boasted to me about how he was going to support Kendra,’ explained Ross. ‘He said—and trust me, this is word for word, because he sounded so up himself, doing his charming routine, it’s burned into my memory—he said, “I’m gonna support Kendra to be an actress. My princess won’t need to do any more shit jobs. I’ll pay for the acting classes, clothes, photos, cosmetic surgery, whatever she needs. I’ll be like a patron of the arts. I’m Italian. There’s a long, long history of rich Italian families being patrons of the arts. Heard of Lorenzo de Medici, mate?”’ His impersonation of Santino was so plausible and sharply funny, some of the jurors had to suppress a smile.

  At the beginning, Anita had feared this trial would be too distressing, too close to Stacey, too much. She’d gone into it with muscles clenched tight, guarded against letting any excess emotion leak into the process. She’d avoided discussing it with Paula, mentioning it briefly, but nothing compared to the detailed accounts of fascinating court scenes she used to offer as entertainment over dinner in the past. She figured it was best not to add to the store of horrible images in her friend’s head.

  But seeing Damien Ross on the stand, bearing witness to Kendra Bartlett with such precision and strength, changed Anita’s mind. There could be consolation in seeing the dead woman and her story acknowledged through this formal process, seeing her killer held to account by Irene Pileris’s methodical work, by the evidence the police had piled up and by the testimony of Kendra’s friend.

  That afternoon, she sent Paula a text—I’m bringing dinner to you—and arrived at the Earlwood house with wine, cheese, bread, prawns and salad stuff.

  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.

  ‘How creepy is that!’ Anita exclaimed. ‘It’s like he wheeled Brooke into a hairdresser, taped a photo of Kendra to the mirror and said, “Make my new one look like my old dead one.” And Rohan reckons the previous girlfriends—including the one who took out an AVO—they look like this too.’

  ‘And the pregnant woman, Brooke—how is she going?’ asked Paula. ‘She comes to court with him every day?’

  ‘Every day. Arm in arm. Makes my flesh crawl to see him paw at her and parade her in front of the cameras.’

  ‘Jesus … the poor woman. Who’s going to look after her once she has the baby?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Anita said. ‘Santino’s sister Marina hovers around outside court, fussing over Brooke. So I guess we have to hope his family will take care of her once he’s in jail.’

  On the afternoon of his second day on the stand, Damien Ross spoke about the many occasions he had witnessed Santino’s flares of temper and the times Kendra had showed up at class with injuries. As her confidence eroded, she dropped out of acting school and gradually withdrew from her friends. Because Santino was enraged by men staring at her, Kendra was allowed out of the apartment less and less frequently. When Damien did manage to see her, he saw the bruises and burn marks.

  The day after Damien Ross confronted Santino about the abuse, he was cut off from all contact with Kendra. John Santino phoned to say, ‘She doesn’t want you in her life anymore.’