Chapter 13 The Client's Second Mind

Anselm Dugray died on the eleventh of February 2026 and I have never met him and that is the single best fact I have and I have to spend a paragraph on it before I can go anywhere, because everything that follows depends on it. I have read four documents written by him. I have read a statement of his affairs prepared in 2011. I have read a board minute of the ninth of March 2018 in which he is recorded as having said, in the course of a discussion about a family matter, the words: "I do not intend to die and I do not intend to explain myself and the two positions are the same position." I have read the codicil. I have read it a great many times. And I have never been in a room with him, and I have spoken to his widow twice and to his daughter eleven times and I have spoken to his brother once, and I have never been in that house in Ardmore Road, and I have stood at the end of it once, in June, in the rain, and I looked at a hedge. So everything I say about him is inference, and I want to be extremely clear about the status of what follows, and I have thought about this since about the middle of July and I have got a structure for it and I am going to use it. He wrote three things that are quoted in this case. I have set them out and I am going to put them in the order they were said, which is not the order people put them in. First, in a board minute of the ninth of March 2018: "I do not intend to die and I do not intend to explain myself and the two positions are the same position." Second, to his daughter, on the fourteenth of November 2025: "It is a long road and Miss Prentice is on it." And: "Not your business, Rosalind, and you will make it your business and be tiresome about it." And: "Not mine," in answer to the question whose sentence it was. And: "You will get a sentence when I have one." Third, on the third of March 2026, to a solicitor in Hallam Row, in a room I have never been in, in a conversation I have got from a receipt and a daughter's memory and a partner's death: nothing at all. Whatever he said in that room, I do not have it, and the person who heard it is dead. Now. Here is the thing I have been getting wrong for four months and I only got it right on about the twentieth of July, in a room with a piece of torn paper in a plastic sleeve on the table. I have been treating the three statements as three of the same thing. They are not. The 2018 one is a man of seventy-four in a boardroom, in front of a minute taker, saying a thing he has clearly said before, and it is a joke, and it is a good joke, and the goodness of it is the point, and there is nobody in that room who thinks he is going to die. The November 2025 ones are a man of eighty-one, four days after a diagnosis he has told three people about, in a kitchen, in the evening, to a daughter he has just told not to be tiresome about it. And the last two of them are not a joke at all. "Not mine," is two words after a question, and it is the only one of the six in that conversation that is not a performance, and I have made my case rest on it, and I think I am right to. The third statement is not a statement. It is not in evidence. It is a conversation in a room in Hallam Row on the third of March 2026 between an eighty-one-year-old dead man and a partner of a firm, and I have a receipt signed at about half past four in the afternoon, and I have never had a note of anything said in that room, and I am not going to be able to have one, and I have to stop pretending that the third statement is a statement. It is a gap where a statement should be, and it is the most important gap in this case, and it has been there since the fourth of March and I have been trying to fill it with everything else. So I have one man, in one kitchen, on one evening, four days after being told he was going to die, saying four things, one of which is an instruction to me. And what I have spent four months doing is treating those four things as a code that I have to solve, and I have assembled, in my own head, the following. That he knew Hale and Marchetti. That he knew they would apply. That he wanted the application to be slow, or to be made, or to be seen to be made. That he wanted somebody young and unknown and slightly foolish to be holding the thing for a while. That he did not want to give the Company to his family because of article 12, or because of the Protected Persons, or because of something said to him in 2017 by a man who has since died. That the codicil is a weapon and it is aimed at somebody and I do not yet know at whom. And I want to write down, in a book, in July 2026, that I have no evidence for a single one of those and that I have built all of it out of four sentences spoken in a kitchen by a man who was frightened, and that if the explanation is simpler than all of that then I have wasted four months and my partner has a point file and a client of fifty-one who has not spoken to me since the second of July. Here is what is simpler. I have got a piece of paper. It is torn. It is a page of the executed settlement. It says a trustee may sell a shareholding which is not a Protected Holding without triggering pre-emption. And the estate's holding in Dugray Precision is about sixty-one per cent. And I have a 2017 letter from a man's own solicitor telling him that pre-emption is of no assistance to him in a disposal of shares, and warning him that no agreement to suspend time is available, and advising him that he is not proceeding on that footing. And I have a codicil, dated three weeks after the testator's death, in which he gives the entire holding to a stranger for two years, and then to the residue. And if the holding is not a Protected Holding — and I do not know whether it is, and that is a question of fact about the 2011 Settlement, and it is a question I can answer in about an hour from the bundle — then the trustees could have sold it in 2017. They could have sold it in 2019. They could have sold it in 2021, and there is an application from 2019 which lost, and I have read the papers, and the application in 2019 was brought by Hale and Marchetti and it failed because it was late. Late. Eleven months late. And in a board minute of the eleventh of November 2019 — which is in the bundle, at tab 88, and which I have read about two hundred times and which I read for the first time properly on the twenty-first of July 2026 — the minutes record that Mr Dugray was asked about the delay and said: "It is not late. It is not early. It is timed." And I want to end here, and I want to stop, because if I go any further I am going to start building a case out of a board minute, and I have learned that a case built out of board minutes by a person who has been in the building for four months is a case about board minutes. I have a fortnight. On the second of September I have an appointment with Aveline Roux, and on the eleventh of August I have an application, and somewhere between today and the eleventh of August I have to decide whether I am arguing that a document is a forgery, or that it is genuine and should be construed in my client's favour, or that it is genuine and unarguable and I should be ashamed, and I have not decided, and I have told nobody that I have not decided, and Aveline Roux has told me three times that I must not file a position I do not hold. The fourteenth of August is a Friday. The application is listed in chambers. I will write down what happens on it.