Gladys and Cynthia escaped the underground network back into the open air at Temple Station. Their precautions to ensure that they weren’t late—largely insisted on by Cynthia—led to their arriving around forty-five minutes before the appointed time for the meeting. They found a convenient café with views over the Inner Temple Gardens leading down to the busy Victoria Embankment and then the Thames with the big wheel clearly visible in the distance. The sun was out but there was still a chill in the air indicating that winter wasn’t keen to let go. Cynthia felt comfortable in her outfit and even more comfortable in the knowledge that their destination was a maximum ten minutes’ walk away. She put her bag down between her legs where she could feel it all the time and sipped contentedly at her coffee. Gladys was keen once again to go over their plans.
“When we get in there, photos first, to the extent we’re allowed to, of course. Some nice close-up shots of her at her desk, maybe on an easy chair as well, just to create the atmosphere. We need her looking business-like. Have your camera ready to go. Taking pictures up front enables us to get them in the can in case the interview comes to an abrupt end for any reason and should settle any concerns she may have in talking to us. We don’t have to race in with the questions straightaway. Is that all understood, dear?”
Cynthia imagined Gladys standing holding the chalk by the blackboard, an overpowering presence getting troublemakers in the class in order or seeking to get over an all-important exam-busting piece of information. She didn’t like to say that she had clearly got the message the first time she’d received these instructions—this was now the third or the fourth; she’d almost lost count. “That all sounds very sensible,” was her eventual response.
Gladys moved on as though she hadn’t heard. “You can leave the talking side to me—showing, not telling is the name of the game here. We lay out a scenario to encourage her to fill in the blanks, to tell us her story as she wants to. We only have an hour so it’s vital we make the best use of it.”
Cynthia felt like putting her hand up. “Do you want me to take notes or chip in with anything which occurs to me—if there’s a silence, I mean?”
“Note-taking, as you like. I’ll have my recorder going. That will require permission at the start, but I don’t envisage problems there. She knows it’s a magazine interview after all.” She bit into the biscuit which came with the coffee. “As for the chipping in, well. I suppose so but think about it carefully.”
“I understand.” Cynthia checked her watch. “Do you think we ought to go, I mean, in case we don’t find it at once? George did say there were a lot of chambers and law offices round here. They could all look similar.”
“I don’t think it will be too difficult to find but there’s probably no harm in arriving early. We might have a few more minutes added on to our hour.” Gladys polished off the biscuit, hailed a waitress and paid the bill, adding a generous tip. Whatever faults she might have she was never backward in coming forward when money was required. Cynthia made a mental note to remember to be quick off the mark in that department when it came to lunch. They set off into a myriad of little streets and Cynthia was secretly pleased when they received lingering looks from one or two older men who passed by. Gladys, who was marching on ahead, didn’t appear to notice. She made an abrupt left turn and then came to a sudden halt in front of some imposing wooden double doors. To one side was shiny brass plate which bore the legend ‘Jetti Chambers’. The doors were firmly shut.
“What do we do now?” Cynthia asked.
Gladys didn’t bother to answer but instead reached up to apply firm pressure to a bell push located just above a speaker grille. A female voice spluttered out: “Hello—Jetti Chambers.”
“This is Gladys Lancashire from Behind the News magazine for Ms Iqbal.”
“Oh right, yes—just a moment.”
They heard a click and the right-hand door of the two gently swung open to reveal a woman who looked to be in her twenties with long blonde hair dressed in a stylish two-piece and black court shoes with high slender heels. “Oh,” she said again, stating the obvious. “There are two of you.”
“This is my photographer, Cynthia Tilling.” Cynthia smiled and brandished her camera, which she’d extricated from the depths of her M&S bag.
“Please come in. My name’s Rachel.” She stood to one side to allow the two women space to get past her, and then pushed the door firmly shut. “I’ll tell Shamira you’re here.” She disappeared through an archway at the back, leaving them alone in the entrance hall. It was largely furnished in grey and white with a bust in one corner which looked to Cynthia a dead spit for Julius Caesar but was probably some honoured influential lawyer from the annals of the past. A vase of flowers standing on the dark grey desk provided a vibrant splash of colour.
Rachel re-emerged and signalled them to follow her back under the archway and up a small flight of steps, where she knocked on a half-open door. She didn’t wait for the summons but led her charges into an office about twice the size of the entrance hall and set out in very similar style, down to a very similar vase of flowers on a central table, but minus the bust. A series of windows along one wall were partially shuttered creating an atmosphere of peaceful harmony. “This is Shamira Iqbal,” said Rachel. “Ms Lancashire and Ms Tilling—Ms Tilling’s a photographer,” she added rather unnecessarily as Cynthia was still holding her camera. “I’ll bring coffee.” She disappeared and Gladys and Cynthia turned their attention to the woman who now confronted them.
She was medium height, graceful in her movements, with a headscarf tied neatly at the neck and strands of black hair peeping out from beneath it. She was attractive in an academic sort of way, with her alert brown eyes surveying them from behind glasses whose rims were virtually invisible. From her own experience Cynthia knew that the price of glasses tended to move up in direct correlation with the thinness of the rims. These were right up there. The black suit the lawyer was wearing had an expensive sheen to it and the shoes were an upmarket version of the ones Rachel had on. “Good day to you both.” Her voice was low-pitched and business-like. “You’re a little… em…”
“…older,” supplied Gladys.
“Well yes, older than I was expecting.”
“We’re old enough to remember the events surrounding the Pennington case.”
“Yes, I suppose you would be. Hence your interest, I imagine. I did have to go back some time to find articles you’d written in the past.”
“I had a career change. Reading the cold case coverage in the press stirred me to go back.” Gladys looked around. “Would it be in order for my colleague to take one or two pictures of you? We like to get that out of the way before we start. Nothing will be published without your approval.”
“No problem.” Shamira posed, first leaning on the edge of her desk and then sitting in one of her visitor chairs while Cynthia busied herself taking several shots. She also took one or two of the office itself before Shamira signalled the end of the photo session by walking towards a group of chairs situated round a low table on the other side of the room. Coffee cups were already on it and, as if on cue, Rachel made another fleeting appearance to place a coffee pot amongst the cups. Shamira poured out the coffee and offered milk and sugar before she sat back, all attention. She cleared the use of Gladys’s recorder with a brief nod.
“Do you mind my asking how long you’ve been practising here?” Gladys opened up.
“About ten years, give or take a bit. I did my pupillage here and was lucky enough to be invited to join the team.”
“And your speciality is human rights.”
“That’s correct, the rights of individuals, women in particular.”
Gladys nodded. “Well, as you know, we’d like to take you back to the day you first met Richard Pennington and move on from there.”
“Yes, I recall it as though it were yesterday.” Her voice acquired an additional layer of assertiveness. “It was cold and wintry, all white with the combination of frost and snow everywhere. This was a family tradition. We always went out for a walk on the morning of Christmas Day. It was a holiday for us rather than a religious day. We knew that most people would be in church or opening presents. They don’t normally go out walking until later so we took the opportunity to go out early. We always went to the same place and we didn’t normally see anyone. We were happy, laughing, like we normally were.”
“And then?”
“And then along came this man on his bicycle. The first we saw of him was when he loomed up alongside us, right next to us, and knocked my sister over.”
“How old were you?”
“I was eleven, holding on to my father. My sister was with my mother.”
“Pennington said he rang his bell over and over behind you.”
Shamira stared back calmly. “That was the first of many lies. He said it was an accident.”
“You don’t believe that?”
She shook her head vehemently. “Definitely not—it was deliberate.”
“Why would he do that?”
“We were in his way. And in his eyes we were second class citizens.”
“What makes you say that?”
She raised her hands. “He tried to overtake us at the narrowest point on hard rutted ground. Then he swung round on his bike and his first words were—‘What are you people doing here?’ My sister was lying on the ground. My father said to him, ‘Can’t you see what you’ve done?’ His reply was, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.’ My father went up to him and grabbed him. That’s when he took off. We had to go to the emergency at the hospital and wait for ever. You imagine this on Christmas Day! After the magistrate effectively threw out the case giving us derisory damages it was three days later when my sister had a brain haemorrhage and died.”
“This must have been terrible for you.”
“It was still worse when Pennington walked free after the next case. He was killed three weeks later.”
Gladys left a slight pause. “How did that make you feel?”
Shamira sipped at her coffee. “At the time? Well, very distressed both for myself and for my parents. They always felt strongly that we as a family hadn’t received justice for my sister and they were angry that they couldn’t find some way of taking him back to court again. His death didn’t bring closure for me or my family. It was at that point at age eleven that I became determined to be a lawyer with the idea of righting injustices where I could. My aunt had already built a legal career in this country after coming here from Pakistan and she also influenced me, but it was our dealings with Pennington that were the big factor.”
“Can you take us through what happened after Pennington’s body was found?”
She gave a laugh which wasn’t really a laugh. “What you would expect I suppose—the police regarded my mother and father as prime suspects. They spent a long time trying to undermine their alibis. In the case of my father he was driving businessmen backwards and forwards to Heathrow and Gatwick Airports over the whole time span of the outer reaches of when the crime might have been committed. All the passengers testified that my father had driven them and that taking into account their schedules and flights they couldn’t see any way he would have the opportunity to kill Pennington. As for my mother there were plenty of witnesses that she was at work all day with no ability to break off other than for very short periods. None of that stopped the police from applying for and gaining a search warrant to enable them to go through our house. They hardly left anything untouched, even taking up all the carpets to see if they could find any evidence of a murder scene. After that they quizzed my aunt as well and checked her whereabouts, but it was my parents they concentrated on. After they failed to get anywhere, they said they followed up other lines of enquiry, but those didn’t yield any apparent suspects.”
Gladys assumed a thoughtful pose. “It sounds as though you think that maybe the police at that time didn’t show quite the same zeal in pursuing other avenues.”
There was another laugh. “That’s your reading rather than mine.”
“Do you think the police took into account that whoever planted the body was trying to direct attention to your parents and, had either of them been the killer, it was a rather obvious clue?”
“Of course. My father pointed that out on more than one occasion. But they had an answer for that as well. They regarded it as an honour killing. That was arguably the worst insult.”
“Why was that?”
“Ms Lancashire, the fact that my father came from Pakistan and worked here as a taxi driver didn’t automatically make him unintelligent or a traditionalist. It was typecasting. He never tried to make me agree to an arranged marriage, for example, nor did he expect me to be subservient to my husband if I had one. He worked hard so that I could go my own way and get the best education possible. The idea that he would kill Pennington and then arrange to have the body deposited on the exact spot where the collision happened with us on Christmas Day to satisfy his honour was both preposterous and abhorrent.”
“Was your life difficult after… how can I put it... the dust had settled?”
“Very. For me personally there were the racial epithets at school. That was standard, but they were worse for me—‘your dad’s a murderer’—that kind of thing. My aunt returned to Pakistan quickly out of disgust. She is still a prominent lawyer and defender of women’s rights there. My parents stayed here.”
“Why?”
Shamira drained her coffee cup. “Me—as simple as that. With my sister gone they worked to put me through school and university. They only went back after eleven years when I had a place and the beginnings of a career. Only then did they escape the shadow.”
“The shadow?”
“Of suspicion—oh, not from the police. They eventually left them alone, apart from traffic stops from time to time. Everyone knew about it. Some passengers refused to travel with my father—others insisted on him driving them, but it was always there. Only when they left this country was it gone.” She smiled as she took a glance at her watch. “Ladies, your hour is up and I’m due in court.”
Gladys stood up and Cynthia, who had been an avid listener, followed suit, stowing her camera away in her bag. “Thank you for receiving us, Ms Iqbal. I’ll submit my script to our editor and then we will share with you what we would like to print. Nothing will appear without your express consent but I hope you’ll approve.”
Shamira held out her hand. “I’m sure I will. As I told you, nobody has asked me to express my feelings in quite this way before so I’m glad of the opportunity. Tell me, what did you do during your career break?”
“I was a teacher.”
“I can imagine that. Your pupils were fortunate.”
“Thank you.”
She ushered them to the door, which Rachel opened at the same moment. “Let me know if your endeavours go anywhere to identifying Pennington’s killer.” Gladys stopped in mid-stride. “Come now, Ms Lancashire, it’s obvious that your interest in the Pennington case goes very deep and extends beyond my feelings about it. You’ve done a lot of research. Please continue with that if you can.”
Outside the two women walked slowly in silence up towards the Strand, not out of any sense of direction but just to be on the move. “You didn’t chip in,” Gladys said eventually.
“There was no need. You were very impressive in there. There was one thing which struck me though.”
“Oh, what was that?”
“When she mentioned her aunt, she never said her name.”
“Do you think that’s important? As I recall, she didn’t mention her sister’s name either. It’s natural enough to refer to ‘my sister’ or ‘my aunt’, isn’t it? Anyway, it would be easy to find out from the news coverage.”
“Sure, but I wondered if she didn’t want to draw attention to it.” They reached the top of the street and looked both ways. “Come on, we should go and have lunch and this time I’m paying!”