第15章 The Retainer

Aveline Roux kept me for fifty minutes on the second of August 2026 and she did not let me say a word for the first twenty of them, and at the end of them she said one thing and then asked me a question and then made me leave. She said: "I have read your advice note of the twenty-ninth of July, and I want to begin by telling you that it is the work of somebody who is frightened and is trying not to show it, and that the second sentence of the last paragraph is the best sentence anybody has written in this case, and that the first sentence of that paragraph is the reason you are frightened, and that both of those are true at once, and that if you can hold both of those at once you will be fine and if you cannot you should withdraw." And then she asked me the question. She said: "Nadia. What is Dugray Precision Limited?" And I said, "A company that makes precision components for valve gear, with about eighty employees, and a freehold at Hallam Row which is most of its asset value, and a majority shareholding held by the estate of a man who died in February." And she said, "No. What is it to you?" And I said, "It is an application, and an application has an applicant, and the applicant is the company." And she said, "I did not ask who the applicant is." And I said, "I know." And she said, "Then I will tell you. In about eleven years I have been instructed in maybe nine cases where the beneficiary and the client are the same person, or where the beneficiary and the client's interest are the same person, and in eight of those nine cases the beneficiary does not know at the outset what the client wants, and finds out in month four, and it is always month four, and in the ninth case the beneficiary knew at the outset, and the beneficiary was a fraud, and I am not saying that you are, and I am saying that the thing which is unusual about you is not the size of the gift. It is that you read it in ninety seconds and then you went to a window and looked at a car park for ninety seconds, and then you put it face down and you read the spine label on the file, and that is the sequence of a person who is frightened, and it is also the sequence of a person who has already worked out that this is about to become the only thing in her life." I said, "It has become the only thing in my life." "Yes," said Aveline Roux, "and you have noticed, and you have not stopped, and that is the professional problem. Not the conflict. The conflict is manageable and it was manageable on the fourth of March and it is manageable now, and I have looked at it, and I will deal with it in writing and it will take a fortnight and it will not save you from anything. The professional problem is that you have been doing this for six months instead of six days, and that you have read nine documents in a language you were trained in, and that you have no adversary who is trying to beat you, and that the one person in the world who could have beaten you died in August 2025, and that you have spent six months winning." And I said, "That is the first thing anybody has said to me in six months that I cannot argue with." "You cannot argue with it because it is about you and not about the case," she said, "and you have been hiding from things that are about you and not about the case since about the fourth of March, and you have hidden from them in a very efficient and very professional manner, and the manner in which you have hidden from them is the reason I asked you to come and see me rather than send me a note, and I am going to say one more thing and then you are going to go back to your office and stop." She said: "On the eleventh of August you are going to file a position. I want to know now, before you file it and before I see it, which position you are going to file, and I want you to say the words, and I want you to say them to me and not to write them, because you have been writing things for six months and every one of them has been a way of not saying them." I said, "I am going to file the case that the codicil is genuine." And Aveline Roux said, "On what basis?" And I said, "On the basis that I cannot prove it is a forgery, and that on the balance of probabilities I cannot defeat it, and that Article 12 is not disapplied in any event because clause 11 disapplies it for the purposes of the codicil only and there is nothing in clause 14 that disapplies it for the purposes of the 2011 Settlement, and that the gift therefore stands and I am the beneficiary for two years and I intend to hand the shares back at the end of it in accordance with the terms of the 2011 Settlement and I intend to do it on the first day and not the last." And Aveline Roux looked at me for about four seconds, and then she said, "That is a bad answer and it is an honest one and I would rather have it than the other one, and I want you to understand that you have just told a silk of sixty-eight that you intend to hold a majority shareholding in a manufacturing company for two years, and that you have no qualifications for it and no interest in it and no plan for it, and that on the second of September 2026 you have said that out loud to a person whose job is to stop you doing foolish things, and that I am not going to stop you, and that in about four years somebody is going to write a note in a law journal about a girl who volunteered to be a fiduciary and I do not know whether it will be a note about competence or about a failure of supervision." And then she said: "Go back to your office and stop, and do not open a file, and do not draft anything, and do not telephone the widow, and on Monday morning you will telephone Aveline Roux's clerk and you will make an appointment for the ninth of September, and you will bring the codicil with you and you will bring the torn page and you will bring your advice note of the twenty-ninth of July, and you will not bring anything else, and if you find yourself wanting to bring something else that is how you will know that you are frightened again."