第14章 Reasonable Doubt

I have to be careful here, because a man from a newspaper has asked me three times whether I am going to allege forgery and I have said no three times, and I have also written a document in July 2026 which says that on the balance of probabilities the codicil is a forgery, and both of those things are true, and I want to set out the position cleanly because I think it is the only interesting thing in this book. Here is the position. The question at the hearing on the eleventh of August 2026 is a construction application. The applicant's case is that clause 14 of the codicil disapplies Article 12 of the 2011 Settlement for the purposes of the codicil, and that the gift in clause 14 therefore takes the estate's holding in the Company without any Protected Person being entitled to a right of first refusal, and that the applicant is accordingly entitled to the determination sought. I am not the applicant. I am a solicitor of two years and eleven days' qualification at a firm of forty-eight, employed by a firm of forty-eight, acting for a company, and I am the beneficiary of clause 14 for a period of two years, and I have never in my life conducted a construction application, and I have now conducted one for about four months. So the first thing I have to do is to be honest about the shape of the case, and here it is. There are two cases available and they are mutually exclusive and I cannot run both. The first case is that the codicil is a forgery. On that case, clause 14 does not exist, Article 12 is not disapplied, the Protected Persons keep their pre-emption, the application fails, and the 2019 application — which was brought by Hale and Marchetti and lost on delay — is revived or re-issued and succeeds, and this company is saved. The second case is that the codicil is genuine. On that case, I am the beneficiary, I have two years, and the man in clause 14 — whoever he is, and the codicil does not name him, and the codicil names only me — took the trouble to make sure that his daughter and his widow and his family would get the Company back at the end of my two years, and in exchange I get two years of holding a majority shareholding in a precision engineering company, which I do not want, and which I am not qualified to run, and which I have not asked for. I have run the first case in my head about four hundred times and I have never been able to get it to the front of a court without a witness, and I have run the second case about forty times and it is the one that is on the papers. I want to be extremely clear about something, because a man from a newspaper put it to me on the sixth of August 2026 in about nine words and I have not forgotten it and I am going to print his nine words and then my answer. He said: "Whose case is it, Ms Prentice?" And I said: "It is the company's." And he said: "You are the beneficiary." And I said, "The company's," again, and he let it go, and I have thought about it every day since, and here is the honest answer, which is that I do not know, and that I did not know then either, and that the fact that I said "the company's" twice within four seconds is not evidence of anything except that I am very frightened. Now. The forgery case, and I want to give it its strongest possible form because it deserves that and because I am its beneficiary and no one else is going to put it properly. The evidence is as follows and I am going to state it without any of the qualifications I have put in the previous nine chapters, because in a courtroom you put the best version and then you get taken apart and that is the correct order of events. One. The codicil is dated the third of March 2026. The testator died on the eleventh of February 2026. Two. The codicil was attested on the third of March 2026 by a witness who died on the nineteenth of August 2025. Three. The testator's signature is not on the codicil. There is a space for it on the ninth page and it is empty, and there is a rubric in ink, and the rubric is in the hand of the typist. Four. The codicil was in the possession of Fairweather Auman, the solicitors to the deceased, at the time of his death, in an envelope, and it was not in the executor's file, and the executor's solicitors have never had a copy of it, and they signed a receipt for it on the afternoon of the third of March 2026, three weeks after the testator's death, from a partner of the firm whose documents they had never seen. Five. A complete photographic reproduction of all nine pages of the codicil appeared in the skeleton argument of Hale and Marchetti on the twentieth of April 2026, stamped on the reverse with the stamp of Fairweather Auman, and the only way to obtain that stamp is to have had the original document in the hand of that firm. Six. A letter from Fairweather Auman of the fourteenth of October 2017 advises the deceased, in terms that are quoted at length in chapter eight, that pre-emption under the 2011 Settlement is of no assistance to him in a disposal of shares, that no agreement to suspend any time period was available, and that he was not proceeding on that footing. Seven. The testator's own solicitor wrote on the twentieth of April 2026, in a paragraph of his own skeleton argument, that the 2011 Settlement correspondence is not in the executor's file and that the applicant has made enquiries of the executor and of the executor's solicitors. Eight. The words "It is not late. It is not early. It is timed" appear in a board minute of the eleventh of November 2019 in which the testator is recorded as having been asked about the eleven-month delay in instructing solicitors for that application. Nine. A provision of the 2011 Settlement providing that the trustees may exercise their disposal powers in respect of a shareholding which is not a Protected Holding, without triggering pre-emption, was torn out of schedule 4 of the copy exhibited to the Protected Persons, between the agreement and the execution, in September 2011, by a person who was present in a room. Ten. Nobody has ever seen the testator's signature on anything signed in 2026, or in 2025, or, so far as anybody has established, in 2024. That is a serious body of material and I am not going to pretend it is not, and I have written in my own advice note of the twenty-ninth of July 2026, in a section headed "Provisional view," the following words, and I am going to reproduce them because a man from a newspaper has described this case to his readers as a piece of legal pedantry and it is not: "On the material currently available, and without the benefit of any forensic document examination, the view is that on the balance of probabilities the codicil is not the testamentary instrument of the deceased, and the primary basis is the date, which is not curable, and the secondary basis is the attestation, which is not curable, and the tertiary basis is the absence of a signature, which is capable of explanation and which I have not excluded." And then, in the next paragraph, which is the paragraph I have read most often: "I record that the codicil is favourable to a construction which assists the Protected Persons, in that it disapplies Article 12 for the purposes of the codicil only, and that the Protected Persons benefit from the remainder, and that the applicant's interest for two years is in my own name, and that these facts are not capable of being put out of the evidence and that I have considered whether they should be put out of the evidence and that they cannot." That is the sentence. I have written that sentence in a legal advice note on the twenty-ninth of July 2026 and it is the only sentence in this case that I would be ashamed of, and I am printing it, and I want to say what I think it means, because I have had six weeks to think and I have not been able to solve it. It means that a man of eighty-one may have built a forgery for a reason, or in a state of mind, or out of love for a company, or out of a desire to punish somebody, and that the forgery is a forgery, and that I have found it, and that I am not going to say so. Or it means that a man of eighty-one was told in 2017 that his own family would not be protected in a disposal of shares, and that in 2019 an application was brought against him and lost on a technicality, and that he decided that the technicality was not good enough, and that he went to a firm he had dealt with for thirty years and asked them to draw a codicil, and that they drew a codicil, and that in November 2025 he told his daughter it was a long road, and that in February 2026 he died, and that between February and March 2026 nine pages were typed and a receipt was signed by a partner who was kind to a dying man's daughter because he was a decent man and because he had done something in 1991 and thirty-five years. And if the second of those is what happened, then clause 14 is a document designed by a dying man and his solicitor to defeat a pre-emption right, and the cost of defeating it was my two years, and somebody in 1991 or 2011 worked out that the price of an unbreakable instrument has to be paid to somebody who is not in the family and cannot be got at later. And that somebody was me, because I was in the building, and my name was on a letterhead, and I was twenty-seven years old.