The session with Helena was not an easy one.
“Why didn’t you tell me before you did it?” Shafiq demanded.
She looked heavy and overburdened, but despite all that a hint of brightness was still there. “Because I was sure you would tell me it was inadvisable. This isn’t about me. It’s about all those women out there who depend on me.”
“So who drafted the press release?”
“That was all my own work. My organisation did the rest. I needed to get the message over that whatever happens to me the work goes on.”
“You realise that this could be seen as self-glorification, like putting yourself on a pedestal?”
Helena’s eyes blazed and she leaped out of her seat like a demon. She pointed towards the door. “If that’s what you think you can leave now. I don’t want you anywhere near me. I’ll defend myself if I have to.”
Shafiq sighed loudly. “I didn’t say that’s what I think—I said that’s how it could be interpreted. And there’s worse. The judge has issued the stiffest rebuke to a defendant I think I’ve ever seen. He thought outside the box with your detention here and that concession was hard won. He will see your behaviour as scant reward for his generosity and an effort to swing potential jurors in your favour. We can’t afford to have him slanted against us. There must be no repetition of this, none. Do you understand?”
She slumped back in her seat. “I understand, but what you and your judge don’t understand and never will is the plight of the women I represent, women whose lives have been destroyed to whom I’ve brought a little hope.”
“Your message is already out there, Helena. The protest marches supporting you and demanding your freedom are growing by the day. They didn’t need a press release to stir them up any further.”
“I’m grateful to them, but my press release wasn’t aimed at them. It was to comfort women elsewhere, especially in Asia. They need to know I will never give them up.”
“All right, all right, but I must insist on a low profile from now until the trial begins. No more initiatives please. We’re out there working twenty-four hours a day on your behalf.”
She gave the glimmer of a smile. “Understood—I’ll enjoy this place while I have it.”
**
It was two days later when the bombshell exploded. Pickard came into Shafiq’s office and plunged a dog-eared sheet of paper in front of him in a spot where he couldn’t miss it. “They must really be going through the contents of those files piece by piece. They’ve just sent this over.”
He went on writing. “What is it?”
“It’s a copy of the tenancy agreement which Helena Iqbal signed to occupy 125 Brayfield Road. There’s no doubt now that it was her—she was the occupant of the house at the time of the murder.”
He abruptly stopped. “Why’s that only come to us now?”
“The excuse is the time taken to go through a surfeit of documents.” Pickard moved closer. “The word is that because of the increasing tension out on the streets and the notoriety which is growing around this case the prosecution would settle for an agreed plea of manslaughter.”
“She’ll never agree.”
“Shafiq, this document places her fairly and squarely in that property, the property where the murder was committed. There’s no arguing against it. We can’t skate around the issue anymore.”
He picked up the sheet of paper and scrutinised it carefully line by line. “It’s a scandal this has only come forward now, three days before the trial begins.”
“I pressed them on it—they say it came from a file still in Sarah Richardson’s office. They’d been concentrating on the old files down in the basement at the Richardson house. For some reason she cobbled together a collection of the old agreements in a file together and kept them upstairs.”
“That sounds pretty thin.” Shafiq put the document down on the table. “This places Helena there as the tenant who signed this agreement. It doesn’t place her there at the time of the murder. It makes her alibi all the more crucial. What about that?”
“They must think they have some way of shooting it down. They have a Mrs Bent who lives opposite on their list.”
“Find out all you can about her and come back to me. How’s Madeleine getting on with developing the source at the law firm?”
“Making progress I’m told. There’ll be a report on your desk by tonight.”
“I hope it’s good. We need a lift!”
**
He was absolutely right about Helena’s reaction. She refused to come out of her cell to see him so he had no option but to sit at the small table in there with her. If she could have found something convenient to throw, she would have used it. “How could you think I would ever agree to that?” she hissed with unconcealed fury.
“It’s an offer I have to put to you. It would carry a substantially lesser sentence and with your work and reputation taken into account and good behaviour in jail…”
“I will never agree, never. My plea is ‘not guilty’. I’m not going to admit anything which might suggest I’m guilty. Let your judge try me in his court with his complicit jury. Don’t you understand anything about me? I want to get out of here and return to my home where I can carry on my work. If I have to rot in a cell, I’ll do the best I can from there. Do you think I care for myself?”
He took a deep breath. “No, I don’t. And I hear you’re not eating despite all their efforts here.”
“The one thing I fancied they couldn’t get.”
“What was that?”
“Christmas pudding. I always enjoyed eating it all those years ago when I lived here and eating it now will remind me of the day when Pennington destroyed my family, Christmas Day. That will fuel the hatred and keep me going. Now go and leave me alone.”
“I’ll get one delivered.”
She shrugged and turned her back.
**
Cynthia Tilling had already started giving some thought as to what she should wear to go to court. The forecast was for a dull day with periods of rain and those conditions were expected to persist for the whole of the first week, which would encompass George’s appearance on the witness stand. For that day she’d resolved to wear the same suit she’d worn for their visit to Gonzalez and Co. and their lunch afterwards. For the first day she thought maybe a black wool dress. She hadn’t worn it for a while and when she tried it on, she was pleased to see how well it still fitted.
There had been another get-together as well to discuss the timing prompted by Gladys, who had been worried that the queue to get in the public space might start forming earlier than they’d anticipated. George had found out from somewhere that the number of Helena’s supporters would be limited to six and that the judge had already decreed any kind of disturbance would lead to them being immediately cleared out. Thus he thought his original idea of being there by eight with the car parked still passed muster.
The women went along with this for two reasons—the first was quite simply because they couldn’t improve on it. Setting off any sooner would mean hanging around outside for a long time quite possibly unprotected from the rain. The second was more troubling. As the trial approached George was progressively becoming more withdrawn. He hardly acknowledged them when he saw them and he seemed constantly to be lost in thought. “I can’t understand why they’ve called me,” he confided to Cynthia during one small bright interlude. “I can’t tell them any more about the house in Clapham, Hinkfield Hall, Gonzalez and Co. or indeed Cauley Mortimer than the police can. They will have explored all those avenues considerably more thoroughly than we ever did. And why the defence?”
This was a question which Cynthia couldn’t even get on the starting grid for answering. She tried to console him by inviting him round for a sherry before dinner. His refusal was courteous but absolute. “I’m not good company at the moment” were his final words on the subject. He didn’t even appear for brandy on the Saturday evening.
“Do you think he’s ill?” Gladys asked.
Cynthia shook her head vigorously. “No, it’s all in his head. Only he can sort it out.”
They heard nothing from George all day until he surfaced in the early evening. “There’s a demonstration in support of Helena Ahmed planned outside the court. The police will be deployed to keep it well away. Anyone wanting to enter the public gallery will need photo ID and police clearance.”
“Photo ID we can do,” Cynthia replied. “What about police clearance?”
“That’s all organised for you and Gladys. Your names are on the record. Tell her please.”
The phone went dead and Cynthia held it in her hand. Having George so cold and distant wasn’t the way she wanted things to go. Shit, she thought, and the word spilled out before she could stop it. Once it had she repeated it several times over, louder and louder until she slammed down a cup on the table and watched it break into pieces, which flew lazily through the air before they scrunched all over the kitchen floor. “Shit,” she said again as she fetched a dustpan and brush. “This trial can’t come soon enough.”
**
It was the following morning when Madeleine Casado came back to Shafiq. She found him sitting back in his chair with his eyes closed. When she coughed the eyes slowly opened. “Sorry,” he apologised, “I was taking a break. What do you have for me?”
“This.” She put down a handwritten note on top of the stack he already had in front of him. “No emails or texts as usual, and none of this is on my laptop.” He nodded in approval. “The person I’m talking to worked on the legal team with Helena headed by Nightingale when they were prosecuting Kelmert, so he was right in there.”
He gave another approving nod as his eyes ran down her script. Then he picked up his pen and put several ticks against the entries. “This is good stuff.”
“That’s what I thought. Now Beatrice Chester whom the prosecution have on their list was the office manager responsible for all the organisation. She was the one who gave Helena responsibility for the vital documents which went missing and called ‘foul’ when they couldn’t be found. My contact had sight of those documents and told me what he could remember from them.”
“I can see.”
“The Chester woman sounds like a right bitch. I’ve put Mike on to finding out what he can about her.”
This was received with yet another sign of approval—Mike Hoyle was the private detective they used for any investigations such as this. “He’ll give you a call this evening,” Casado put in, anticipating the next question. “The next thing you’re not going to like. Helena liked to go jogging and everyone on the team knew about it.”
Shafiq threw down the pen. “She told me she went jogging—as time allowed. What’s new about that?”
“Yes but this is serious stuff. On the day of the murder she was off for the whole of her lunch break.”
“Why didn’t we know about this? I repeat—she told me she spent the lunchbreak working. The jogging would only be if she had spare time.”
Casado shook her head. “From what I hear that wasn’t the case on that day. She disappeared as soon as she could and the prosecution have witnesses. What she described to you might have been her usual routine. She may have varied it on that day.”
Shafiq picked up the pen and chewed on the end of it. “Or perhaps she didn’t.”
“There’s something else too. According to the court record, the jurors were stuck in the lift that day so the afternoon session was an hour late starting. Helena was ten minutes late coming back but because of the lift incident, it didn’t matter.”
Shafiq wiped his forehead and then drew his hand slowly down his face. “All right—I’ll be prepared for this. Anything else?”
She nodded. “You’ll like this better. Terrence Taylor, who’s my contact, left the firm because he felt he was being overlooked for promotion. He’s Black and wondered if that might have been an issue. I don’t know if that’s a card you want to play.” She didn’t wait for the answer. “I have some more interesting stuff from the bank which literally just came in. The golden lions—there were ten of them made and they’re solid gold. There was a record of who they were handed out to and the guy at the bank thinks he might be able to find it. It would be instant dismissal or worse if he’s caught but he’s near retirement anyway and feels he’s stashed enough away. He worked for Pennington and Miller and detested both of them.”
“Hard to work somewhere for forty years and dislike your boss.”
“Many people do.” She grinned and put her notebook away. “We’ll keep in touch. Are you seeing Helena today?”
“I’ve been to see her already. She’s suffering from headaches, which may be the lack of food. I’ll see her again later on and try to do whatever I can to persuade her to help me, like engaging with the jury for example, but I’m not hopeful. She’s like an icicle now ever since I put the manslaughter option to her, so hard to reach. But she ate the Christmas pudding.”
“Great—that was one of my Mum’s specials—she makes them every year. My Dad loves them too.”
“He’s Spanish, isn’t he?”
“So what? Everyone loves a good British Christmas pud. You should try it.”
“Maybe I will after this case is over!”
“Pickard will be in court with you tomorrow. I’ll be roaming around. If I have more today, I’ll call you.”
**
Shafiq received two calls that evening. The first was from Mike Hoyle, who had compiled what seemed to be a full biography of Beatrice Chester. “I though this information could be very germane,” was how he concluded his report. “Germane” was one of his favourite words and its use acted as a signal that he considered he’d done a good job.
“I’m sure it will be,” Shafiq agreed as he congratulated him.
Then he heard again from Madeleine Casado. The record kept by Gonzalez and Co. of the distribution of the golden lions had been located but still wasn’t in their hands. “He’s going to try and get hold of it tonight,” she confided. “It could be the last chance—he thinks the questions he’s asking are raising suspicions.”
He wiped his forehead. “Keep trying—it could be crucial.”