Chapter 11 The Lost Clause

I have been calling it the lost clause for five weeks and I have now established that it is not lost, it is drafted, and it was drafted in November 2011, and it is clause 15 of the 2011 Settlement, and it is in the bundle, and I have read it about four hundred times, and Mr Lowe has read it, and the judge read it out loud on the second of July 2026, and I do not know what it does. Here is the entire content of clause 15 of the 2011 Settlement as it appears in the copy agreed between the parties and exhibited at tab 31 of the 2011 bundle. "15. [Not agreed]" That is it. Three words and a bracket. Not agreed. In about September 2011, four people sat down for three days in a room in this city with two firms of solicitors and a barrister between them, and they agreed every other clause of a settlement that has governed a family company for thirty-one weeks and has been the subject of nine proceedings, and on the last afternoon they did not agree clause 15, and the person who typed it up wrote "[Not agreed]" in a bracket, and everybody signed it, and the clause has been "[Not agreed]" ever since. I want to say something about that, and I want to say it without any irony at all, because the irony is enormous and I am not going to help it. Here is a man of eighty-one, in November 2025, asking me in a kitchen in Ardmore Road whether his shares are protected, and there is a settlement in the world that he signed in 2011, and one of the clauses in it says "[Not agreed]", and nobody in this case, including the judge, has been able to find out what it was going to say. Now here is what I have done about it, and I want to be honest that it is very little, and that I have done it badly, and that I have four weeks. I have four people who were in the room in September 2011, as far as I can establish. Four. The first is dead. Anselm Dugray was the founder, and he is the testator, and he is dead. The second is alive and is eighty-nine and is in a nursing home about thirty miles away, and I have not approached him, and I am going to explain why in a moment, and it is not cowardice, and I would like the reason to be printed. The third is Dominic Fairweather, who is seventy-one, and who is a partner in Fairweather Auman, and who is the executor of Peter Auman, and who signed the 2017 letter in which he advised a client that no suspension of limitation was available, and who was very kind to a dying man's daughter on the third of March 2026, and who has not answered one of my four letters. The fourth is a woman of about eighty-four, who was a partner at Fairweather Auman between 1974 and 1991, and who left the profession in 1991, and who is alive, and who has not answered one of my letters, and whose name is in the 2011 bundle at tab 9 as a signatory. Let me deal with the eighty-nine-year-old man, because I think it is the most important thing here and because I have been asked about it by a man from a newspaper who used the word distasteful, and I would like to explain the position properly. His name is Alfred Pike. He is a retired toolmaker. He held shares in Dugray Precision in 2011 and sold them in 2016. He has been in a nursing home since about February. He is not a lawyer, he is not an executor, he is not a party, and I have no legal reason to approach him and no professional duty to, and if I approach him I am approaching an eighty-nine-year-old man in a care home to ask him about a bracket in a document from 2011. And the reason I have not is this. On the second of July 2026 the judge said, in open court, in front of about six people, in words that are in the transcript: "Mr Prentice, if there is a person alive who can tell us what clause 15 was going to say, then there is a person alive who can tell us whether this codicil was made by this testator, and I would ask you, before you do anything else in this case, to consider whether that person is a person you should be asking." I have thought about that sentence for five weeks and I have decided that the answer is yes, and that it has to be yes, and that the only way I can do it and live with myself is to do it in a way that does not put the weight of this case on an eighty-nine-year-old man in a care home. And so I have done something that I have no authority to do and that I would do again. I have written to the nursing home. Not approached. Written. Addressed to the manager, at the address, and I have enclosed a letter, and the letter says in the first paragraph: "I am not asking you to give me any information about Mr Pike's health, his care, or his circumstances, and if you believe that a letter from me would distress him then please destroy it and do not tell me that you have done so." And in the third paragraph it says: "Mr Pike is not a party to any proceedings and I am not asking him to give evidence or to be interviewed on any matter connected with this case. I am asking whether he would be willing to tell a solicitor, in the presence of somebody of his own choosing, whether he remembers anything about a document he signed in 2011, and if the answer is no, or if the answer is that he does not remember, that is the end of it and I will not come back." And I have not, in seven weeks, had a reply. I sent a second letter on the twenty-eighth of June, before the first, and the dates are in the wrong order because I wrote the second one at about eleven at night in a state I am not going to describe, and the first one went on the eleventh of July, and I have sent exactly two letters, and both of them say the same thing, and neither of them asks for anything. The last thing about clause 15 is this, and it is the thing I have been getting wrong for five weeks. I have been treating clause 15 as a mystery. I want a document. I have wanted a document since the second of July. And on the fifteenth of July, in a corridor, a clerk of twenty-four said something to me that has been in my head for four weeks, and I am going to end on it, because it is the only piece of this case that has actually moved and I have not done anything with it. It was the twenty-second of July 2026 and we were going up in a lift in this building and he said, "Miss, nobody was looking for clause fifteen." And I said, "What?" And he said, "I typed the schedule in 2011. I was twenty-two. And there was a page that was folded down at the bottom and it wasn't in the agreed version, and I asked the other clerk and he said leave it, it's not agreed, and I left it, and it went in the bundle folded down, and it is still folded down, because it is a photocopy and nobody has ever opened it." And I said, "Theo, where is it?" And he said, "Bundle four. Behind tab 31." And I said, "Is it folded down now?" And he said, "No, my Lady. It's out. I opened it in January and I put a slip in the file, and I have not shown it to anybody because I did not know if I was allowed, and I have been sitting on it for six months."