第4章 A Question of Attestation

Peter Auman, who witnessed the codicil on the third of March 2026 and who died in August 2025, is the first thing in this case that is impossible, and I want to explain the impossibility properly because I have now read it out loud to four people and each of them has needed a different amount of help. A will or codicil executed on or after a certain date in this jurisdiction must be in writing, and must be signed by the testator, and must be signed in the presence of two or more witnesses present at the same time, and each witness must either attest and sign the will, or acknowledge his signature, in the presence of the testator but not necessarily in the presence of any other witness. There is a dispensing power in section nine of the Wills Act for a document purporting to embody the testamentary intentions of a deceased person, and I have read it about forty times, and I am going to tell you now, on the record, that in my view it has no application to this document and I am not going to rely on it. I want to be very careful here, because this is the point at which a great many untrue things could be said, and one of them would be very easy to print. Peter Auman was a solicitor. He practised in Hallam Row for about thirty-one years and he was a partner at Fairweather Auman for about nine of them. He died on the nineteenth of August 2025, which is six and a half months before the date of the codicil. I have his death certificate, because I have paid for it, because it cost nine pounds and fifty. I have his estate file, because a person dies and there are documents and the documents go to the people who are entitled to them, and his partner at Fairweather Auman is a firm of nine people, and the estate file contains his original signature, and I have compared it, and it is a reasonably distinctive signature, and I would not put it past a jury. I want to say that sentence again because it is the sort of sentence that ends careers. I would not put my own client's original signature past a jury. A signature is a habit, and a man who has signed nine thousand documents has one way of signing, and that way does not change when he dies, and it does not change if somebody has traced it, and it does not change if a man alive has never seen the dead man's signature except on a document from nineteen ninety-four. That is the whole of the case for the codicil. I am not going to dress it up. I want to set out, for the record, the three things that are wrong with the codicil, and then I want to set out the three things that are right with it, and I want the reader to hold both lists. Wrong. One: it is dated after the testator's death. Two: the attesting witness was dead at the date of execution. Three: the testator's own signature is on the codicil, and I have not seen it, and no one in this family has seen it, and nobody has produced a specimen. Right. One: the document is complete, in nine pages, and there is no page missing and no blank page and no substitution. Two: it was found in a sealed envelope and the envelope has a date on it and the date is the eleventh of February 2026, the day the testator died, and it was found by his solicitor, and I have the file letter. Three: the codicil has a rubric in ink, and the rubric is in a hand that is the same hand as the codicil's body, and there is a light impression on page nine of a word that reads "executor", and if the rubric says executor then the testator intended to name a substitute executor, and if he intended to name a substitute executor then he thought he was going to die, and if he thought he was going to die then somebody told him, and if somebody told him then somebody knew in the same week as a man who wrote an application in 2019 and lost it. None of that is proof. I want to write that in capitals in my own book because I have spent four months learning to write that sentence and I did not know how to write it when I started. So I have a document that is either a forgery, or the most extraordinary thing I have ever read, and I am a solicitor of two years and eleven days' qualification and I am the beneficiary in the first case and the second. I want to record what I did about it, because it is what I would tell a junior to do, and because I did it in the wrong order, and because the wrong order is instructive. I did it in the wrong order. I read the codicil, and then I read rule 3.4, and then I went to the person whose name was in the codicil and asked her questions, and I did not walk into the room of the woman who was dead. I went to Fairweather Auman on the nineteenth of March, which was nine days after the interview with Rosalind Dugray, and I went alone, and I did not telephone Martyn Craddock, and I did not ask Deborah to make me an appointment, and I walked in at about ten past four in the afternoon and asked to speak to whoever dealt with estate business. There were two people. One was a partner of about fifty-five called Dominic Fairweather, and the other was a solicitor of about thirty called Harriet Vane, and I want to record that I did not know until I was in the corridor that they were partners in a firm of nine, and that I found out because the plate on the door said FAIRWEATHER AUMAN, and I stood in the corridor for about four seconds. And a man of about sixty came out of a room and looked at me, and said, "Can I help you?" and I said, "I'm looking for somebody who dealt with Peter Auman's estate." And the man said, "I'm sorry, who are you?"