第2章 Loose Ends

I went to the twenty-second floor at about ten past five and I put the codicil on Martyn Craddock's desk and I told him what it said and I did not paraphrase it. He is fifty-eight. He is a corporate partner and he has been at Brannock Vey for twenty-two years and he does not do estates and he does not do private client and he has, on three occasions in my three years in this firm, been extremely decent to me in a way that I have never told anybody about and which I have decided to set down because I have been asked, twice, by men from newspapers, what my career has been like, and I am not going to answer that question with a lie. He read clause fourteen. He read it twice. Then he said, "How long have you been qualified?" "Two years and eleven days." "Two years and eleven days," he said, and put it down, and looked at the window for a bit. "Mr Craddock—" "I know what it looks like," he said. "I have been doing this for thirty-four years and I know exactly what it looks like, and I want to tell you the first thing, and I want you to hear it properly, because if you hear it properly then the rest of this is easy and if you do not then nothing after this will help you." "I am listening." "First thing," said Martyn Craddock. "Nobody is appointed by a will. Nobody. It is the single most misunderstood thing in the entire field and it is misunderstood by clients, by the press, by the other side in every case I have ever run, and by about half the junior solicitors I have trained. A will does not appoint an executor. A will nominates one, and the person nominated has to apply to the court for a grant, and the court can and does refuse, and the court appoints whoever it thinks is fit. That is section twenty-two of the Probate and Administration Act and it has been in this jurisdiction since before I was born." "So even if the codicil is valid—" "Even if the codicil is valid, and even if it names you as executrix, which it does not, because clause fourteen does not name you as executrix, it names you as a beneficiary, and those are two entirely different things, and about four people a year confuse them and it costs them money." I wrote that down. I want to be honest that I wrote it down. "So what has he done?" I said. "With clause fourteen?" "He has attempted to leave a gift to you," said Craddock, "and there is no such thing as a gift to a beneficiary, because a gift is a gift to a person, and you are a person, so the gift is good on its face, and the question is not whether you can take it. The question is whether you may, and whether you may is a question under the professional conduct rules, and if you may not, then the gift fails and it falls into the residue, and the residue is the other half of that clause, and the other half of that clause is Hale and Marchetti." "Garr — Garrick Lowe is at Hale and Marchetti." "Garrick Lowe is at Hale and Marchetti," said Martyn Craddock, "and has been for twenty-two years, and is the senior partner of its property division, and has done about nine construction applications in this city, and one of them was against a company called Dugray Precision, in about 2019, and lost it, and I was on the other side of that one, and I am going to tell you something about it and then I am going to stop talking about it and give you the rule." He said: "We beat him because his application was late, and the reason it was late is that the managing director of Dugray Precision did not instruct us for eleven months, and the reason he did not instruct us is that he is eighty-one and difficult and had spent nine months believing the application would be granted. I know that because I have met him. I have met him twice. He is a horrible old man and I liked him." "So there is a history." "There is a history," said Martyn Craddock, "and I am going to tell you the second thing now, and the second thing is the rule, and then I am going to ask you a question and I want you to be honest, and I want you to be honest before you have finished thinking, because I have found that the people who think first are the ones who end up in trouble." He said: "Under rule 3.4 of the professional conduct rules, a solicitor must not act where there is a conflict of interest. Rule 3.4 and its commentary deal with a gift of substantial value from a client where the gift is linked to the obtaining of business, or where the solicitor is not the person who would ordinarily be expected to receive it. Read it tonight. I want you to read it and I want you to read the commentary and I want you to come back to me tomorrow and tell me in your own words what it says, and I want you to be able to say what it says, not to be able to argue that it does not apply." "I have never read the commentary." "Then read it tonight," he said, "and then come and see me, and then tell me what you are going to do." So I said the honest thing, which I have been asked about twice by a journalist and which I said before I had finished thinking about it, and which I am going to print because it is the truest thing I have done in my working life: "Mr Craddock, I have read clause fourteen four times and I have not read the commentary, and I want to say that I do not know what I am going to do, and I want to say that I did not know the moment I finished reading it either, and I want to say that when I finished reading it the thing I felt was not temptation." "What did you feel?" "I felt that somebody had made a very long road," said Nadia Prentice. And Martyn Craddock looked at me for a moment over the top of his glasses, and then he said, "That is a very inconvenient feeling and it is very common in this kind of case, and the reason it is common is that in my experience most of the people who do it do not get caught, and the people who do get caught are the ones who were sure. Go home. Read 3.4. Do not telephone your mother about this because your mother will advise you correctly and incorrectly at the same time."