On the wedding night I worked out one thing: that I had eleven minutes of audio and that I must not say a single word to anybody in that building.
Including my father, on the phone, at half past midnight, which is the hardest four minutes I have ever had.
I rang him and I said: Dad, I need you to ring your solicitor in the morning.
And he said: what’s happened, Maris.
And I said: it’s going to be a very long wedding night, and I will tell you everything tomorrow, and please do not ring me back tonight.
That man did not ring me back. He did not turn up at that hotel either, which he wanted to do, and which he has told me since he sat in his kitchen until four in the morning deciding not to do.
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.
