第6章 The Executrix's Account

I am going to do something here that I have not done anywhere else in the whole of this and that I have been thinking about since the twenty-fourth of March, which is to set down somebody else's words at length, in their own order, without putting anything of mine in the middle of it. Rosalind Dugray gave a statement on the twenty-fourth of March 2026 to Ashcombe Fenn, in the form used by that firm, and I have seen it, and I have a certified copy, and I am permitted to print it because I have a written permission dated the second of July which my partner has read twice and thought about and approved, and which was given to me by a woman of fifty-one on the grounds that it is the only way anybody will ever read it. I am going to print the material part, which is about two thousand words, and I am going to print it without interruption, and then I am going to tell the reader exactly what I think about it, and I am going to try to be fair. [Statement of Rosalind Adelaide Dugray, 24 March 2026, taken at the offices of Ashcombe Fenn, Hallam Row.] "I am the sole child of Anselm Otho Dugray, born 4 June 1944, died 11 February 2026. I am fifty-one. I am a director of Dugray Precision Limited, resigned 14 June 2022, and I am the holder of a substantial shareholding, 38 per cent, and I have not sold any of it and I have not been asked to. My father was difficult. I want that on the record in my own words and not softened. He was not cruel. He was not unkind. He was a man who could not be in a room with a person who was not useful, and I have been in that room my whole life, and I want to say that it is possible to be loved by him and to be worn down by him and I have managed both for fifty years. He was a heavy smoker from 1961 and he drank more than he should from about 1970 and he stopped drinking in 1994 without any help and without telling anybody, and he worked every day including Saturdays until the eleventh of February 2026. He came from a family of toolmakers. His father and both uncles worked at Hallam Row Engineering, which closed in 1978. He left school at sixteen and went into the same trade and was a toolmaker by 1962 and set up his own business in 1968 with about four hundred pounds of his own money and a loan from my grandmother. That is the whole of the business. There was no money in it anywhere and there was never any money in it and the company has never made more than about two million in a year and there are about eighty people employed and the freehold of the Hallam Row building is worth most of the assets. I was elected to the board in 2011 and I resigned in 2022 and I have not been to the Hallam Row site since about 2023 and I am not a good daughter and I have made my peace with that and I would rather say it here than have it said for me. Now the codicil. My father spoke to me about clause fourteen once, which was on 14 November 2025, in the study at Ardmore Road, in the evening. I will give the conversation as near as I can. I asked him: 'What is clause fourteen for?' He said: 'It is a long road and Miss Prentice is on it.' I said: 'What long road, Father?' He said: 'Not your business, Rosalind, and you will make it your business and be tiresome about it.' I said: 'I am not going to be tiresome about it, I am going to ask you once, and I have asked you once, and I would like an answer, and I would like it to be a sentence.' He said: 'You will get a sentence when I have one.' I said: 'Whose sentence?' He said: 'Not mine,' and that was the end of it, and I left the room, and I did not ask him again, and I have thought about that about ten thousand times since the fourth of March and I would do it differently and I would not do it differently. I did not tell my mother about that conversation. I did not tell my brother, who is in another country. I did not tell Mr Craddock, who had been instructed in 2019, or in 2018, and I do not know in which year and I have not asked. I was not in the house on the third of March 2026. I was at a trustees' meeting in the city and I was not there and I have the diary. I did not sign anything on the third of March 2026 until the afternoon. I want to be clear about the word signed, because a man from a newspaper has used the word freely and I want to correct him. I did not sign the codicil. I signed a receipt. There is a difference and it is the only difference that matters. What I signed on the third of March 2026, at the offices of Fairweather Auman in Hallam Row, at about half past four in the afternoon, was a receipt for a document. It said that I received one codicil, that it was dated the third of March 2026, that it bore no signature of the testator, and that I was told by the partner that the testator was deceased, and I signed it, and the partner said there was no hurry and the matter could be sorted out, and he was very kind about it and I have not been able to stop thinking about how kind he was about it. I did not read the codicil on the third of March. I read it on the fourth, at Brannock Vey, at about half past ten in the morning, in Mr Craddock's office, and it was nine pages, and I read it in about eleven minutes, and I read it again in a car on the way home, and I telephoned the firm on Thursday morning, and Mr Craddock was in London, and I left a message, and I telephoned him again on Friday and he was still in London. I telephoned him on Friday because I could not work out what I was supposed to do and I am not a person who is supposed to do nothing. I have not been able to explain to myself why I did not telephone my mother first. I want to put that in because it is a thing a person would notice about themselves. I telephoned a firm of solicitors before I telephoned my mother, and my mother has been married to my father for forty-one years and she is in that house and he died in it, and she found him. There is one more thing and I am putting it in because I have been asked twice about it and I have given two different answers and I have decided to give the true one. In November 2025 my father asked me whether I knew a firm called Brannock Vey. I said no. He said: 'You will.' I said: 'Father, what do you mean?' and he said: 'I am eighty-one and I have made a lot of arrangements and I do not remember all of them,' and that is the whole of it, and I believed him, and I have not been able to stop not believing him since the fourth of March." [End of material extract.] Here is what I think about it, and I am going to be as fair as I can, and I am aware that I am the beneficiary. I think it is a performance. I am going to say why in four items, and then I am going to say the thing that is stopping me from being sure, and it is not a legal point. One: the request to her father is well formed and it is the request of a person who has been told what is in the codicil and wants it confirmed. "What long road" and "whose sentence" are not the questions of a daughter. They are the questions of a person establishing a chain. Two: she did not telephone her mother. She went to a firm of solicitors. I have been around this for four months and I have not found a single other instance of a person in this family putting a professional institution ahead of a parent, and I have looked, and I have asked, and I have been told that the family does not do that. Three: the receipt. "It bore no signature of the testator." She signed a receipt for a document with no signature on it, on the day, from a man who told her the testator was dead, and she has described that man as very kind, and I have not been able to see a person in a receipt. Four: the November 2025 conversation. He says "you will", and she says "I do not remember all of them", and she has put that in a statement and she has put it in it as a defence, and the thing about it is that it is a good line. It is a very good line. It is the line of a person who has been told something a great many times about memory. Here is the thing that is stopping me. She put "Not mine" in quotation marks. She put "It is a long road and Miss Prentice is on it" in quotation marks. She put "Not your business, Rosalind" in quotation marks and gave the whole of the sentence from memory, five months after the conversation, in a statement she knew would be read by a court. And a woman who has manufactured a document in order to put a firm of solicitors into a will does not, in my experience, remember and reproduce three sentences of an eight-second conversation in a room five months later, and does not do it in a statement that she is going to be asked about by somebody who is looking for her. I would like to be wrong about this. I have wanted to be wrong about this since the twenty-fourth of March and I have managed to be wrong about it three times, and each time I have gone back to the statement and each time she has been there. I want to say one further thing and then I am going to stop, because I have been writing about this for two months and I have got nowhere and the deadline is the eleventh of August. There is a version of this case in which a difficult old man, told by a doctor in about 2025 that he had a year, spent fourteen months constructing an instrument to hand a company he had built out of four hundred pounds and a grandmother's loan to a stranger, and was stopped, and knew he was stopped, and did it anyway, four weeks after he died, in a room I have never seen, with a signature belonging to a man who had been dead for six months. And there is a version in which a company that is worth most of its value in a freehold is being taken by a firm of solicitors who have never lost a construction application, and a document has appeared, and it names a beneficiary who is a junior in an opposing firm who has been in the building for four months. Both versions fit the nine pages. That is the difficulty and it is the whole of the difficulty, and I have been living with it since the fourth of March, and I have four months left, and I am twenty-nine years old, and I am the beneficiary in one of them.