第3章 The Client Who Could Not Sign

The executor was the dead man's daughter and she came to the ninth floor on the ninth of March at about eleven, and she was fifty-one, and she was wearing a black coat in a way that suggested the coat was not the point. Her name is Rosalind Dugray. I want to give her a paragraph of her own here, because a man from a newspaper has twice described her as the grieving daughter in the family business, and that is a phrase that belongs to a completely different book, and I am not going to use it. She is an engineer. She has a first-class honours degree in production engineering from a university in this city and she spent nineteen years as a director of Dugray Precision Limited, which is a company that makes precision components for valve gear, and she was made a director in 2011 and she resigned in 2022, and the reason she resigned, according to a minute of the board that I have read and that she let me read without comment, is "to pursue other interests." She has other interests. She is on two charitable trusts and she chairs one and she does, by her own account, about nine days a year of consultancy for a company in Hallam Row that turns turbines. She sat down in a two-desk office opposite mine on the ninth floor, on the ninth of March, and she said: "You've read the codicil." "Yes." "And you know what I want." "I know what the codicil says you want," I said. "I don't know what you want." Rosalind Dugray looked at me for about four seconds with an expression I have thought about a lot. "I want to tell you that my father is a difficult old man and that he did this for a reason and that the reason is a good one," she said. "I cannot tell you that, because I have read clause fourteen and I do not know the reason, and I have read it about forty times, and I asked him about it in November and he told me not to be boring about it." "When did he die?" "The eleventh of February, at about four in the morning, at home." "I'm sorry." "He died in the chair in the study, and he was eighty-one, and he had been a heavy smoker for sixty years and everybody in this family had known for about fifteen years exactly what that meant, and I am not going to be told anything different about it by anybody, including a doctor, and that is the only thing I am certain of in the whole of this." That is the entire interview about the death and I accepted it and moved on and I have thought about it since, and I want to record that it was the only part of that conversation in which she was in the room, in the sense that the rest of the time she was a person executing an office and I was a person who would ask the questions. I asked her the first question in about the fourth minute. I had it written down and I want to record the questions in the order I asked them, because in about June I read back through my own file and the order is the whole story. "First question. Do you know who drafted the codicil?" "No." "Do you know who witnessed it?" "No." "Do you know when it was signed?" "No." "Do you know where it was signed?" "No," said Rosalind Dugray, and then she said, "and that is four questions and I would like it noted that I have answered all four of them accurately, because I have been asked three of them by a man from a newspaper in a coffee shop in Hallam Row in the last fortnight, and I answered those three the same way, and he wrote that I was being evasive." I said, "I am not going to write that." "You are going to write what you like," she said, "you are a lawyer, and I am the executor, and one of us has a professional duty and it is not the one who is owed the rent on this floor." The second question was: "Had you spoken to your father about the codicil before he died?" And she stopped. That is the first thing that happened to me in this case that was not a document. She stopped for about eleven seconds, and she did not look away, and she did not answer, and I want to describe the eleven seconds because I have counted them twice and I am not sure the count is right and I would rather give a wrong number than a smooth one. When she did answer, she said: "I asked him in November what clause fourteen was for." "And what did he say?" "He said, 'It is a long road and Miss Prentice is on it.'" And then she said, "And I said, 'What long road, Father,' and he said, 'Not your business, Rosalind, and you will make it your business and be tiresome about it,' which is a thing he said to me about twice a month for fifty years and which I have never once minded until I sat on the ninth floor of a firm of solicitors and read it in a document." I have got to set that sentence down exactly as she gave it to me, and I have been unable to improve on it in four months, and I have tried. The third question was the one that mattered and I have to confess that I did not know at the time that it was the third question that mattered. "Did your father have a solicitor?" She said, "He had a solicitor in 2011 for something and I do not know who." "And now?" "Now he has a codicil dated the third of March 2026 which was attested on the same day, and if you have read it properly then you will know that there is a name in the attestation clause and I can read it perfectly well, so I am not going to pretend that I cannot, and I am going to tell you that I have looked at that name about four hundred times and I have never once been able to place it, and neither can my mother, and neither can my brother, and there is no reason on this earth that I should be able to place it because I do not know that man." "Who is it?" "It is a man called Peter Auman," said Rosalind Dugray. "And he died in August of 2025." And then I did something I should not have done, and I have written it out in the file and I have told a silk about it and I have not told Martyn Craddock about it, and I am printing it here. I said, "Mrs Dugray, your father died on the eleventh of February 2026, and the codicil is dated the third of March 2026." And she said, "Yes." I said, "That is after." And she said, "Yes." I said, "That is three weeks after he died." And she said, "Yes," and then she said something that I have not been able to forget and have not been able to explain to anybody, and she said it standing up, with her coat already on, in a two-desk office on the ninth floor at twenty past eleven in the morning: "He was dead for three weeks, Mr Prentice, and I signed the codicil in a solicitor's office in Hallam Row on the third of March, because he made me, and because I have spent fifty years doing what I am told in this family, and because I did not read clause fourteen until the fourth, and I want you to write that down properly, because you are going to write it wrong."