Chapter 5 Discovery

The application opened on the twenty-second of April 2026 at about ten in the morning, in the Construction Chamber, before a judge sitting in a court that has four rows of public seats and about nine of them were full. I want to record the composition of that court because I have thought about it since, and because it is the single most reliable index of how this case was understood at the time by the people in it. Front row, left: the applicant, Dugray Precision Limited, by its managing director, who was a man of sixty-eight called Emory Fenn. He had come up from Birmingham and he was wearing a tie that had been bought on a Sunday. Front row, left, second seat: me. Behind him, because he had a fixed station by agreement: the executor. Not Mrs Dugray. A man of about fifty called Peter Kestrel, of a firm of trust and estate practitioners called Ashcombe Fenn, who was, and I did not know this for eleven days, Emory Fenn's cousin by marriage. Behind me: Theo Marchetti, twenty-four, in a jacket that had been ironed that morning, with a bundle of four hundred and eleven pages in a red folder, and who had never been in a construction chamber in his life. Right of the aisle, front: Hale and Marchetti, and Mr Lowe. He did not look at me when he came in. I want to be very accurate about this, because I have been asked twice by men from newspapers whether Garrick Lowe looked at me, and both times I have said no, and both times the men have wanted it to be yes, and both times I have refused to give them what they wanted. Garrick Lowe is fifty-two. He is the senior partner of the property division at Hale and Marchetti, which is a firm of sixty-one. He has been at that firm for twenty-two years. He has done about nine construction applications in this city and he has never lost one. He is a man of medium height with a face that is difficult to describe and that I have watched about two hundred and forty hours' worth of video of, because I have, since about the middle of May, been watching every hearing of his that the court office publishes, and I have written down the things I can see. He does not fidget. That is the first thing. He has no visible habit. He does not look at his notes during submissions, which I have established is a deliberate technique and I have established it because I have done it myself since I noticed him doing it. He stands with his weight even. He addresses the court as "my Lord" or "my Lady" and never as "the judge" and never as the surname. And he did not look at me, and I have thought about why, and I have got a theory that I am fairly confident about. He knew. I want to be careful, because the word "knew" is doing a great deal of work in this paragraph and I want to define it. On the twentieth of April 2026, two days before the hearing, Hale and Marchetti filed a skeleton argument with a schedule of documents attached, and at bundle tab 6 there is a document entitled "Codicil dated 3 March 2026". It was in the bundle that Garrick Lowe filed on the twentieth of April. The codicil was in an envelope in a box on the twenty-second floor of Brannock Vey until the fourth of March, and it came out of a firm's letterbox in Hallam Row, and the executor's solicitor had the original of it, and it had been in the executor's solicitor's safe since the eleventh of February, and nobody in this case had given a copy to anybody, and the document that Garrick Lowe put in his bundle on the twentieth of April is a complete photographic reproduction of all nine pages, which is not something a firm files unless it has had the original in its hands. I want to set down what I could prove and what I could not, on the fourth of May, in a hearing about discovery, and this is going to be the shortest part of this. Proved. Hale and Marchetti had a complete reproduction of all nine pages of a codicil, at bundle tab 6, on the twentieth of April 2026. The document bears a stamp on the reverse of the ninth page. The stamp is a firm stamp and it reads FAIRWEATHER AUMAN, HALLAM ROW, and it is in ink, and it is about four millimetres high, and it is on the reverse, which is what a firm does when it photocopies something. Not proved. That the reproduction was made before the twentieth of April. That anybody at Hale and Marchetti had read clause fourteen before the estate did. That Peter Auman, deceased, or anybody at Fairweather Auman, had anything to do with it. I put those two lists in that order in a hearing and I want to record that Mr Lowe did not contest a single item on the first list and did not address the second one at all, and that he said one sentence, and that the sentence was this: "I am instructed that my client's interest is in the residue. My client has no interest in any document my opponent may or may not have seen, and I would ask my Lord to note that the question was not put." And then the judge, who is Hon. Esther Mallow and whom I have now studied for about four months, said: "Mr Prentice, you have four months. I will give you four months and I will not give you a fifth, and if you have not applied by the eleventh of August I will dispose of this application in chambers and I will hear nothing from anybody. Sit down." And I said, "Thank you, my Lady." And I sat down, and I have four months, and it is the fourteenth of July, and I have used eleven of them. Here is the strange thing, and I want to end on it because it has kept me awake and I have not resolved it. If Garrick Lowe had a complete reproduction of all nine pages in his bundle on the twentieth of April, then on the twenty-second of April, in a court, in front of a judge, a woman of twenty-nine read clause fourteen aloud — because that is what an applicant's skeleton requires, the material terms, and she read it because she had to — and Mr Lowe, who had a copy of the whole thing, did not object to a single word of it. And that is not what a man who is surprised does.