And he said: “Evening, Mr Calder. Can I get you some water?”
And that is where all of this actually starts, and I will come back to it.
I asked him to come closer, and I said I wanted to make him a proposal.
And he frowned and said, “Mr Calder, if this is about extra care — I don’t do anything that isn’t allowed.”
And I said: that is exactly why it’s you.
“Ring my solicitor. Tomorrow I am changing my will.”
He thought I was confused until I got my phone open with a thumb that was not working properly and showed him what was in it.
I said: my wife is killing me. If that money goes to her, she wins.
And he stood there for about eleven seconds and then he got his phone out.
At ten o’clock on the morning of the eighth, a woman of sixty-one called Meriel Dane came into that room with a briefcase, a laptop, a camera and another solicitor as a witness.
And I signed four documents.
And everybody assumes the will was the weapon, and the will was the least important of the four.
Document one. A sworn statement.
Everything Bettina said to me on the evening of the sixth of January, in her words, with the time on it.
Recorded on video. Forty-one minutes. Meriel Dane asked me eleven questions and I answered all of them on camera, and a second solicitor and a duty consultant were in the room for the whole thing.
A statement from a man who knows he is dying, about the cause of his own death, is a very particular kind of evidence.
Document two. A request for a hospital post-mortem, and my written consent to it, and a specific direction that samples be retained.
That is the one.
Because everything my wife had planned depended on a quiet death, a short private service, and a cremation.
And a man who asks in writing, with capacity, for an examination after his own death is not a thing his widow can overrule with a phone call.
