He sent one message at about one.
It said: whatever it is, you have not been stupid. Sleep if you can.
I have kept that. It is the only thing anybody said to me that night that was any use.
The rest of it came from a woman called Imelda Raynott who has been doing estate litigation for twenty-six years and who read those receipts on a Tuesday morning and said, very quietly, oh, that’s interesting.
What she found is not complicated and that is the point of it.
An executor is allowed to pay the estate’s expenses. She is not allowed to lend it to one beneficiary, informally, for nine years, and record it as an expense.
There are four properties. Two of them were sold in 2019 and 2021.
Saoirse was told the estate was mostly the house and it’s complicated, and she was twenty when her father passed, and she believed her mother, and she signed what she was given at a kitchen table.
Imelda’s phrase for that, which I have written down, is: it is not usually a conspiracy. It is usually one person who decides they are better at money than everybody else, and then spends nine years being right about it.
PART 4
And now my part, because there is no honest version of this without it.
I was warned.
At the engagement party in the March, his sister pulled me over by the coats at the back of the function room.
She said one sentence to me. She had clearly been working up to it all evening.
She said: whatever they put in your name, go and get your own solicitor.
And I laughed.
I want to put down exactly what I saw and did not read.
She was holding her own coat. She had it over her arm, in a warm room, an hour before anybody was leaving.
She had been ready to go for an hour. She had picked the spot furthest from the room, by the rail, where nobody would come.
And her hands were going.
All of that was in front of me and I processed none of it, because I had already decided who she was, from things her brother had told me in a car.
