The Silent Lady - Catherine Cookson

The woman who presented herself at the offices of a respectable firm of London solicitors was, the receptionist decided, clearly a vagrant. The clothes that hung on her frail body were filthy, and she seemed almost unable to speak. When she asked to see the firm’s senior partner, Alexander Armstrong, she was at first shown the door. But when Mr Armstrong learned the name of the visitor, all the office staff were amazed at his reaction. For Irene Baindor was a woman with a past, and her emergence from obscurity was to signal the unravelling of a mystery concerning an inheritance that had baffled the lawyer for twenty-six years.