Chapter 50
FIFTY
So the letter writer and the sewage dumpers were working in concert, she thought resignedly as she read the latest missive.
She wasn’t surprised. But, once again, she had the unsettling sense of matters escalating, pressure mounting, the locals becoming ever more determined to force her and Matt out.
And Jamie would make another move soon, she was certain.
The solar farm, though devastating, was a long-term manoeuvre – she’d read on the internet they could take years to get through planning.
No: having so effectively turned the village against Matt and Kate, he’d want to press home his advantage.
It was almost a relief, then, when she saw a white Tesla pull up outside the house one morning and Jamie climb out.
In his hand was an envelope. She saw him screw up his face at the smell – even though Mick had pumped the effluent away and drenched the area with hoses, it still stank.
A moment later, there were three loud raps on the front door.
She left him standing there almost a minute. Perhaps childishly, she wanted him to breathe as much of that excrement-scented air as possible.
‘Christ, what have you done out here?’ he said disgustedly when she finally opened the door. ‘It smells like the drains are blocked.’
‘What do you want?’ She ought to tell him she was sorry for his loss, she knew, but, after that eulogy, she was damned if she would.
He handed her the envelope. ‘This, for starters.’
She opened it. The document inside was headed MISSING CHATTELS.
Underneath was a list. Portrait of Captain Pelham by George Hayter .
. . Meiji-period oriental vase . . . Jacobean console table .
. . He’d put down everything Rosemary and Paul had left, plus all the junk she and Matt had cleared from the cellar.
Ibanez electric guitar . . . Box of schoolbooks . . . Shop display mannequin . . .
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she scoffed. ‘The stuff in the cellar was just rubbish that Rosemary asked us to get rid of. The other things were gifts.’
‘Gifts that should never have been made. That portrait’s worth over thirty grand. That alone should have alerted you to what was going on with my mother.’
‘What do you mean?’ she said, puzzled. ‘There’s nothing “going on” with her.’
He regarded her coldly. ‘Mum’s been given a formal diagnosis of stage-three dementia, most likely Alzheimer’s. She didn’t have the mental capacity to give away anything, let alone precious family heirlooms.’
Kate gaped at him, speechless.
‘You didn’t think she really liked you, did you?
’ he said scathingly. ‘She was just confused and trying to be polite. Which you repaid by getting your rapacious little claws into her just as fast as you could.’ He nodded at the list. ‘You can have all that delivered to Pelham House. Guy’s kindly putting me up until you vacate. ’
‘We’re not vacating,’ she said automatically, her mind still reeling as she tried to get her head around what he’d just said about Rosemary’s diagnosis.
‘Of course you are. You can’t possibly stay here after all this.
The only question is, when and at what price.
’ He considered. ‘I haven’t checked recently, but I think the offer still comes to just about what you paid for it.
And it’ll be much better to sell now, while things are still reasonably civil. ’
‘This is hardly civil,’ she snapped.
‘Believe me, this is positively friendly compared with how it ought to be.’ His face hardened even further – she could see muscles pulsing in his forehead.
‘You’ve not only taken advantage of a frail old lady with dementia, you’ve effectively murdered my father.
I’m not likely to forgive you either of those. ’
He was serious, she realised with a shock. Somehow, he had actually convinced himself that the narrative he’d constructed to denigrate her and Matt was true. It was preposterous – absurd, even – but also so barefaced, so self-deluding, that it was impossible to find the right words to dismantle it.
When she didn’t say anything, he indicated the list. ‘A copy of that’s been sent to your solicitor, along with some other matters that require his attention. I suggest you take it up with him.’
It took two hours to pin Matt down between meetings, and another hour after that to organise a Zoom with their solicitor.
‘The chattels that were left in the house aren’t an issue,’ Anwar told them.
‘If anything, it was the sellers’ responsibility to deal with them.
The Hayter portrait is a different matter, because Mrs Finch apparently gave that to you without consulting her husband.
On the face of it, it does seem unusual behaviour.
But it’s a stretch to say that it’s evidence she doesn’t have capacity.
People are entitled to make bad decisions. ’
‘I don’t believe for one moment she has dementia,’ Matt said.
‘Well, they’ve managed to find a private doctor who says she does.
And they’re claiming you should have known from the start that her decision-making was disordered – as proof of which, they point to the fact you weren’t even the highest bidder for Trade Cottage.
Kate, apparently you yourself told a neighbour you thought she might have Alzheimer’s. ’
‘I don’t think I did,’ Kate said, puzzled.
Anwar consulted the documents. ‘Olivia Hoggart, who runs the village book club?’
‘Oh,’ Kate said, outraged. ‘Liv. I didn’t tell her – I asked her. Rosemary had been behaving oddly about a fireplace. But it all got cleared up – and, anyway, Liv said she was sure she didn’t.’
‘And there was an incident at a party, where she didn’t recognise you? Several people saw that, their lawyer claims.’
‘Well – yes,’ Kate admitted. ‘But it was the first time she’d seen me wearing make-up.’
‘And, apparently, on more than one occasion, she completely forgot they’d moved out of Trade Cottage and was found pruning plants in your garden. The gardener’s confirmed that part of it.’
‘That’s totally twisting it! She comes and prunes things because she doesn’t think I’m a very good gardener. And because they sneakily gave themselves that access.’
‘Yes,’ Anwar said. ‘I was coming to the access.’
Something about the way he said it alerted her that there was worse to come. ‘What about it?’
‘Well, that right of way is for their benefit, not yours. Apparently, you’ve been going on to their property uninvited.’
‘That’s rubbish,’ Kate said. Then she remembered. ‘I’ve left a card and some flowers a couple of times. And, of course, there was the time I heard the gunshot.’
‘There’s a formal warning to desist – harassing a vulnerable elderly woman living on her own, is how they describe it. But, to be honest, all this is just chaff to pad out their main demand.’
‘Which is?’ Matt asked.
‘They’re applying for a judicial review of the contract to purchase Trade Cottage. They want the judge to order a rescission.’
‘A rescission?’ Kate echoed. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s when a contract is wound up and it’s as if it never happened.
So they would pay back the purchase price, minus a reasonable deduction as rent for the time you’ve been living there, and then they would own it again.
There are very, very few grounds for rescinding a property contract like that.
But, unfortunately, lack of mental capacity is one of them. ’
‘What – so we’d just give it back? But that’s madness!’ she exclaimed. ‘What about Paul? His name was on that contract too.’
‘Yes, but they both had to have capacity for it to be valid. And, apparently, there’s evidence he’d realised his wife was getting dementia and was covering up for her.’
Suddenly, that line of Jamie’s at the funeral made sense: On top of everything else, there were the worries he’d confided about my mother’s health.
But, sadly, the burden and the sense of failure were just too much to bear .
. . ‘The bastard’s been planning this for weeks,’ she said bitterly. ‘He even built it into his eulogy.’
‘There are various other bits of so-called evidence, too,’ Anwar added. ‘They’ve got a handwriting expert to look at some notes she wrote, dating back over the last year; apparently, there’s a marked deterioration, consistent with neurological decline—’
‘And also consistent,’ Kate interrupted, ‘with her having arthritis in her fingers from fifty-odd years of gardening, which is what she told me she’d got.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Anwar said. ‘But I think gathering all this material is more about convincing you that they’re deadly serious about pursuing it, than convincing a judge. They’ll be hoping you’ll balk at the cost of fighting them and try to reach a settlement instead.’
‘Accept his offer for the house, you mean? Never,’ she said firmly.
‘When you say, “the cost of fighting them”,’ Matt said quietly, ‘how much are we talking about?’
Anwar shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s hard to say.
But you’re going to need a whole team of lawyers now – as well as the property and contract issues, there’s the capacity aspect, which will need a court-of-protection specialist, and probably a KC too, and a junior if they really throw the works at it.
Potentially, it could all reach half a million, and, if they win, you might have to pay their costs as well. ’
Kate’s jaw dropped.
Matt said, ‘And is that also true in reverse – if we win, we could claim our costs from them?’
‘You could certainly try.’
‘So it’s a gamble, then,’ Matt said heavily. ‘A million-pound game of chicken.’
Anwar nodded. ‘“Lawfare”, it’s sometimes called – using the courts, and the threat of litigation, to bully people. I’d like to say it doesn’t work, but unfortunately there’s a depressingly large number of cases where it does.’