Chapter 5: What Frank Knew He Was Walking Into
I found a hotel six blocks from Claire's house and paid for three nights in cash.
I didn't know yet how long I would need.
But I knew I wasn't leaving.
I sat on the edge of the bed with my phone and called my own solicitor back home — a woman named Patricia Osei who had handled Frank's and my affairs for twelve years.
It was early morning her time.
She answered on the second ring.
"Ruth.
I wasn't expecting to hear from you."
"I need you to pull our joint will.
The one we filed in 2009."
A pause.
"Of course.
Is everything alright?"
"No." I told her about the folder.
The firm.
The signature.
The solicitor's warning about a man whose name he wouldn't give me.
Patricia was quiet for a moment.
"A will executed abroad, with a foreign firm, while you were still married — that's contestable, Ruth.
Especially if there's any question about the circumstances of signing."
"There is," I said.
"The solicitor confirmed Claire was in the room."
"That alone could be enough to challenge undue influence." I heard her chair move.
"I'll pull everything today.
Don't sign anything, don't agree to anything, and don't let Claire know you've spoken to me."
"She already knows I'm not going home quietly."
"Good.
Let her know that much and nothing more."
After I hung up, I sat with the room quiet around me and thought about Frank.
He had been a careful man.
Not cold — careful.
He measured things before he said them.
He kept his promises.
In forty years, I could count on one hand the times he'd surprised me, and every one of those surprises had been kind.
He had engraved those words before he boarded the plane.
That meant he already suspected something when he left.
He went anyway — and I had encouraged him to go.
That thought sat in my chest like a stone.
But I pushed past it, because guilt wasn't useful yet.
Understanding was.
Why go, if he was afraid?
I picked up my phone again and opened the photographs of the will.
I read it more carefully this time, looking past the beneficiary line to the clauses beneath.
There was a section I had skimmed before.
A clause about the family home.
Frank and I had owned our house together for thirty-one years.
Joint tenancy.
In the event of one partner's death, full ownership passed automatically to the survivor — that was how joint tenancy worked.
A will couldn't override it.
But this document tried to.
There was a clause asserting that Frank had transferred his share of the property to a separate holding, and that holding was now part of the estate.
I read it three times.
If this document was accepted as valid, I could lose the house.
My hands were steady.
I noticed that and was grateful for it.
I went back to the solicitor's letterhead and looked at the second name.
Hargreaves & Crane.
I had focused on Hargreaves.
I typed the second name into a search: Crane, property law, the city's name.
The third result stopped me.
A property development company.
Registered two years ago.
One of the listed directors was a man named Stephen Crane.
The other listed director was Claire Hollis.
I set the phone down on the bed.
Claire wasn't just trying to inherit Frank's money.
She was trying to take our home and turn it into an asset for a company she already owned.
Frank had walked into that house knowing something was wrong, and he had still gone — because he needed to see how far she would take it.
He had been gathering evidence.
And then he had d*ed before he could bring it back to me.
I picked up the phone again.
I needed to find the man who had been in Claire's house.
May you like
The one Hargreaves was afraid of.
Because if Frank had been building a case, there was a chance he hadn't been building it alone.
