第18章 A Settlement Offer

The offer came in on the seventh of August 2026 at about half past four in the afternoon, by hand, in an envelope with HALE AND MARCHETTI in the top left corner, and it was six pages, and it had a deadline on it, and the deadline was the tenth of August 2026 at four o'clock in the afternoon, which was twenty-four hours before the hearing listed for the eleventh. I have written out what the six pages said and I want to do it as a list, for the same reason I have done everything as a list, which is that I have discovered that I can only think properly when I am numbering things, and that this is probably a symptom and not a method. Paragraph 1. Hale and Marchetti, for Hale and Marchetti of the city, solicitors, offer the following terms in resolution of the construction application of Dugray Precision Limited, the applicant, and in resolution of all claims between the parties. Paragraph 2. The parties agree that the codicil dated the third of March 2026 is not capable of being relied upon as the testamentary instrument of the deceased and shall be treated for all purposes as void. Paragraph 3. The parties agree that clause 11 of the codicil does not disapply Article 12 of the settlement dated the twenty-second of April 2011, and that the Protected Persons' right of pre-emption under Article 12 is unaffected by the codicil. Paragraph 4. The applicant withdraws its application for the determination sought in paragraph 3 of the notice of application dated the sixth of April 2026 and consents to an order in chambers that no determination be made. Paragraph 5. The parties agree that the costs of the application be shared equally. Paragraph 6, and this is the one, in full: "The applicant's solicitors shall, by 4pm on 10 August 2026, provide to the respondent's solicitors a schedule of all occasions on which, on or before the date of this offer, any partner, associate, solicitor or employee of the applicant's firm, and any person acting on their behalf, has had contact with any partner, associate, solicitor, employee or agent of Fairweather Auman, in this city or elsewhere, in connection with the codicil dated 3 March 2026 or with any document which is or may be a copy of it; such schedule to state the date, the place, the persons present, the persons spoken to, and the substance of what was said." I have read paragraph 6 about four hundred times in nine days. It is a reasonable request. I want to say that first, because everything after this is going to sound like I think it is an attack, and it is not, and I have checked it with Aveline Roux and with a partner at a firm of forty-one who does nothing but professional conduct, and both of them have told me that it is a reasonable request and that I should probably comply with it. It is also, as drafted, an admission request with no limit on it. I want to set out the problem in the plainest terms I can, because I think this is the most interesting document in the whole case and I do not think anybody will ever read it. Paragraph 6 asks for every contact with Fairweather Auman. It does not limit itself to contacts "documentary." It does not limit itself to contacts in writing. It asks for the persons present, the persons spoken to, and the substance of what was said. Which means the following. That I walked into a building in Hallam Row on the nineteenth of March 2026 and was let in by a partner, and I told him, truthfully and without concealment, that I was looking for somebody who had dealt with Peter Auman's estate, and he asked who I was, and I said my name. That he took me to a corridor and we talked for about eleven minutes about a man who had been dead for seven months, and that I have never told anybody what he said to me in that corridor, and that paragraph 6 would require me to state the substance of it. That I went back on the eleventh of April 2026, and again in May, and I have been in that building nine times since the nineteenth of March. That on the seventeenth of June 2026 I drove to the end of Ardmore Road and stood at a gate for about four minutes and looked at a hedge, and that paragraph 6 does not require me to say that, because a gate and a hedge are not in Hallam Row, and Mr Lowe does not know about it, and I have decided this week that I am going to tell him about it anyway. That on the twenty-second of July 2026 I stood in a lift in my own building and Theo Marchetti told me about a folded page. And here is what paragraph 6 does not reach and cannot reach, and I want this on the record because I have spent nine days working out whether it is a trap and I have decided it is not a trap, and the reason it is not a trap is the most interesting thing I have found in six months. It does not reach the room. There is no paragraph in the offer, or in any document I have received, that asks me what I said in a room on the fourteenth of April 2026, or to whom, or in what order, or about a dead man's partner. Mr Lowe has had six months and a discovery application and a fortnight of correspondence. He knows there was something in this case that he did not have. He knew it in April 2026, when he put a complete reproduction of nine pages into his own skeleton argument and stood up in court and said "the question was not put," and he has never asked me a single question about how the applicant came by it. Why? I have asked Aveline Roux this question on the telephone on the sixth of August and she said, "Because he does not want to know, Nadia, and you should be more frightened of a man who does not want to know than of a man who does." I asked her what she meant and she said: "A man who wants to know wants it in order to use it. A man who does not want to know wants it in order to be able to say, later, that he was never told. Those are not the same and only one of them is a problem for you." So I have three things to decide before four o'clock on the tenth of August 2026, and I am going to write them down at the time I was writing them, which is the ninth of August 2026 at about eleven at night, at a two-desk office on the ninth floor, because the cleaners have been and it is very quiet. One. Whether to comply with paragraph 6. Two. Whether to disclose the conversation in the corridor of the nineteenth of March 2026, and what in it, and who decides. Three. Whether to say anything at all, on the tenth of August at four o'clock in the afternoon, in response to an offer whose effect is to have a junior solicitor of two years and eleven days' qualification state on paper the substance of every conversation she has had for five months about a dead man. I have written a great many things and I have spent six months discovering that I can do this: I can put a document on a table and read it and number what is in it and say what follows from it. I did that in March with nine pages and I did it in June with a torn sheet and I did it in July with a boarding minutes and I did it in July with a six-page offer. I have not been able to do it with paragraph 6. I have been sitting at this desk since about seven o'clock. It is a Tuesday. The hearing is on Wednesday. I have a hundred and ten thousand pounds of costs going on a hearing that has not yet been listed with a witness list, and I have not slept, and I have had a cup of tea and I have not drunk it, and at about half past ten I opened a new document on the screen and typed the words: "Schedule of contacts with Fairweather Auman — applicant solicitors" and then I have not typed anything else, and it is now eleven o'clock, and that is where I am going to stop, and I am going to go home, and I am not going to say that I answered it, because I have not answered it, and because I do not know what I am going to do, and because I have spent six months learning that the only honest thing to say about a thing I do not know is that I do not know.