第9章 Deposition of Theo Marchetti

I have to set down what happened with Theo Marchetti and I have to be fair to him and I have to be fair to myself, and the two of those things are in direct conflict, and I am going to explain the conflict rather than resolve it. Theo Marchetti is twenty-four. He has been a clerk at Brannock Vey for two years and eleven months, which is one month longer than I had been qualified when I read the codicil. He was born in this city. He did a law degree at a university in this region and he was refused by nine firms and he took a job at a firm that does estates and property and does not pay enough, and he has a first-class degree and a salary that I know to the pound because he has told me, and he told me in a corridor in June, unprompted, and I have not been able to forget that he told me unprompted. He is not related to Hale and Marchetti. I want to deal with that at once and completely, because a man from a newspaper has printed twice that there is a connection, and there is not, and I have established it, and the establishment took me nine days and one obituary. The firm's name is Hale and Marchetti. It was founded in 1971 by a man called Hale and a man called Marchetti. A man called Marchetti left the firm in about 1988 and was not, as far as anybody can establish, a member of the Marchetti family thereafter. Theo Marchetti's grandfather was a shipwright in another country. There is a telephone directory in this city from 1974 that lists four Marchettis and none of them is Theo Marchetti's line, and Theo Marchetti's line is in it, because his mother is from here, and I have read the entry and I will not print it because it is a private document that I obtained in a way that I would rather describe in a lecture than in a book. Mr Lowe and I discussed it in a corridor on the twenty-ninth of June, of all things, outside the robing room, for about four minutes, because he brought it up, and he said: "Your clerk and my firm." And I said, "There is no connection and I can prove it." And he said, "I know there's no connection. I have looked for one, and I did not find one, and I am telling you that I looked, and I am telling you that I looked because I have spent four months assuming there was one and it would have been extremely useful to me." And that is the only conversation I have ever had with Garrick Lowe that was not in a room with a court in it, and I have thought about it a great deal, and I am recording it because I think it is the most important evidence in the case. He looked for a connection. He wanted one to exist. He wanted it badly enough to spend four months assuming it. And he looked, and he did not find one, and he told me, in a corridor, on his own initiative, without any compulsion, and before I had asked him anything. I want to be extremely careful here, because I have spent five weeks being furious with Theo Marchetti, and I am going to say why, and then I am going to say the thing that has made me stop being furious, and I have got to say both. On the second of July 2026 I served a witness statement on Theo Marchetti, in my own name, and I served it in the name of Dugray Precision Limited, and I did it at about four in the afternoon, and I gave him about forty minutes' notice, and I did that because I was told by a silk that it was available and because I did not want to put him in a position where he had to find himself something to say in a corridor in twenty minutes. I want to set out what his statement says, because it is the thing that damaged me and I am going to read it out in the way that he wrote it and not the way it reads in court. "The deponent is Theodore James Marchetti, aged 24, a clerk at Brannock Vey. The deponent makes this statement in support of the applicant Dugray Precision Limited. The deponent has been asked by the deponent's supervising partner, Mr Prentice, to note the following matters from the file of the 2011 Settlement, which the deponent has handled." Item one. "On the sixth of January 2016, in the course of routine file review, the deponent typed a short note onto a standard template and a copy of that template was in the file. The template is headed 'Note of telephone call' and it records a call between Mr Auman and Mr Dugray, and the substance of it is that Mr Dugray asked whether any provision of the 2011 Settlement could be disapplied, and Mr Auman is recorded as saying 'I have told you that it cannot be done and that I would not advise you to attempt it.' The deponent typed the note in January 2016 and the deponent did not appreciate its significance at that time and the deponent has not appreciated it until approximately 4 July 2026." Item two. "In about November 2017 the deponent was asked to retrieve a box from the Hallam Row store. The box was labelled with a reference of the 2011 Settlement. The deponent retrieved the box and carried it to an upstairs room and gave it to Mr Auman, and Mr Auman said thank you, and the deponent left. The deponent did not open the box. The deponent now knows, having been asked by the deponent's supervising partner, that the 2017 letter would have been in that box, and the deponent has no recollection of the box's contents." Item three. "The deponent's supervising partner asked the deponent, in about November 2025, whether the deponent had ever seen a codicil referring to the deponent's supervising partner by name, and the deponent said no. The deponent has not changed that answer and considers it to be true." And that is the statement, and it is about four hundred words long, and it is entirely true, and every item of it is against my client and against me, and two of the three items are about something I have no way of explaining. I am going to set down the reason I was angry, and I am not going to pretend it was anything noble. Item two means that a box containing a document that a partner of Fairweather Auman wrote in 2017, in which he advised a client not to attempt to disapply Article 12, went into a room in Hallam Row in about November 2017, and the only person in the world who could have taken anything out of it or put anything into it, in that building, on that day, was a twenty-one-year-old clerk who carried it up a flight of stairs and handed it over. And Mr Auman died on the nineteenth of August 2025. And I want to be very fair to Theo Marchetti, so here is what I am going to say, and I have been working on it since the second of July and it is the only part of this I actually needed to write. He did not volunteer any of this. I have sat in a court and watched a witness statement be read and I have watched the witness not look up, and I know what that looks like, because I have done it, in an application in March, about a document, and I have not set it down because it was mine and it was different. Theo Marchetti was a clerk. He was asked to note things from a file. He typed a note in January 2016 because that is what clerks do. He carried a box in November 2017 because that is what clerks do. And in November 2025 he was asked, by a supervising partner, in a corridor, whether he had ever seen a codicil with my name on it, and he said no, and he has never changed that, and it is true. What happened on the twenty-eighth of June 2026 is that a supervising partner of two years and eleven days' qualification sat in a room with a twenty-four-year-old clerk and told him that there was a question in this case about a box, and that the box had been carried by him, and that a partner of a firm had died since, and that the deponent might wish to think carefully about what he had been asked in November 2025 and when. And I want to say the thing about that which is the hardest thing here. I did not tell him to change anything. I did not tell him what to write. I did not put a word in his mouth. And I sat in that room for fifty minutes and I said, in effect, that a man had died and that a box had gone into a room and that a question might be asked about the box and about the room and about a corridor in November 2025. And he was twenty-four. And I was not. And the statement he has now filed is true. Every word of it is true, and I have verified every document he has cited, and I have had his junior years checked by his own firm and by the Law Society, and he is a good clerk and he is going to be a good solicitor and I have made him the only person in this case who has been frightened. I have written to him. I want that on the record, because a man from a newspaper asked me about it and I have said no comment and I have now changed my mind, and the reason I have changed my mind is that Theo Marchetti has been nothing but scrupulous in seven weeks and has cost me the only thing I wanted in this case, and it would be obscene to go on pretending otherwise. Here is what I wrote to him, and I am going to print it, and he has seen it and he has not replied to it, which I take to be correct. Theo — I was unkind to you in that room on the twenty-eighth of June and I have known it every day since. I did not lie to you and I have not been able to work out how I came to do that and I am not going to try in a book. What I did was tell you the position honestly and let the weight of it do the work, and you are twenty-four, and I am the beneficiary, and you did not have a person in that room who was on your side and that was my fault and not yours. Your statement is true and I have checked every word of it and I am not going to ask you to change one character of it. I want to say something else. I have gone through the 2017 letter and the 2016 note and the box, and I am satisfied about the box, and I am not satisfied about the corridor, and I am not going to be able to satisfy myself about the corridor in four months, and I think that is how it will end. If you ever want to talk about it properly, come and find me, and I will not put a single word in your mouth, and I will not be in a room with you again on this matter without your solicitor present. I am sorry. N.P.