The case was real. Matthew Neely, a retired fruit merchant, built the house called Hillmount on a corner of the old Laird farmland at Shantallow, on the northern edge of Londonderry. The lane that fronts the property is still called Laird’s Lane.
Between January 1913 and 1918 he made and changed his will fourteen times. In 1914 a stroke took the use of his writing hand; his solicitor’s attendance notes record a man alert, stubborn and changeable, and the correspondence in the file shows the question of his capacity being asked, carefully, again and again. His doctor’s recorded answer went no further than this: I can’t say he is unfit.
On Sunday 8 December 1918 a cattle-dealer named Hugh Doherty, driving home to Derry in his spring van, found Neely waiting at the bottom of Greenhaw Lane and gave him a lift to the Tremont Hotel. He died there that day. The family dispute over which will should stand, Neely v. Neely, came on at the Londonderry Summer Assizes on 28 July 1919, before the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, Sir Thomas Molony. The case settled by consent; Molony had the county special jury sworn anyway; and the solicitor F. G. Dickson alone gave the evidence that proved the final will. The estate was sworn at £3,000. The town had rumoured £10,000.
Three years later the Public Record Office in the Four Courts at Dublin burned, and seven centuries of Irish records went with it. The papers in Neely v. Neely survived, rolled up, soot-stained, and are held today by the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). This novel is built from them: the wills and codicils, the attendance notes, the depositions of the tailor, the barber, the cattle-dealer and the rest. Where the record speaks, the book follows it. Where it falls silent, the novel imagines, and the Author’s Note inside says which is which.