The Silent Lady

The woman who presented herself at the offices of the respectable firm of London solicitors was, the receptionist decided, clearly a vagrant who had been sleeping on the streets. When she asked to see the firm’s senior partner, Alexander Armstrong, she was at first shown the door – but then the entire office staff were disrupted by Mr Armstrong’s reaction when he learned his visitor’s name – clearly Irene Baindor was a woman with a past, and her emergence from obscurity was to signal the unravelling of a mystery that had baffled the lawyer for twenty-six years.