Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe's disputed codicil

Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe's disputed codicil is not simply a questionable alteration to an estate plan: it is the document whose apparent gift to Olga Seminoff first suggests forgery, while later testimony raises the possibility that a separate, genuine codicil had also been signed. The distinction between what witnesses remember seeing and what was submitted for probate turns the paper itself into a puzzle of handwriting, signatures, and witness identity.

Earlier wills and the startling bequest

For many years, Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe's wills followed a stable pattern. Charitable gifts and legacies to old servants might be revised, but the bulk of her fortune was left to her nephew, Hugo Drake, and his wife, who was also Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe's first cousin and niece. If one predeceased her, the other would inherit. Her arrangements also included the bungalow she had built for the landscape designer, who could live there for as long as he wished, and an income intended to maintain Quarry Garden and keep it open to the public. Against that long-established pattern, a new document in favour of a recent member of her household was bound to attract attention.

The alleged final disposition was made about three weeks before Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe's death and was not drawn up by her usual solicitors, Fullerton, Harrison and Leadbetter. It purported to be a handwritten codicil. It retained some charitable bequests, though fewer than before, omitted legacies to the old servants, and left the entire residue of her considerable fortune to Olga Seminoff in gratitude for her devoted service and affection. The size and direction of the change made the document seem unlike her previous testamentary decisions; family members might have challenged it on grounds of impaired judgment or undue influence, but the issue that emerged was more direct: whether the handwriting was hers at all.

The forgery allegation

Handwriting experts concluded that the codicil submitted for probate was a complete forgery. It bore only a faint resemblance to Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe's writing, a weakness the solicitors reportedly detected quickly. That expert assessment did not rest on the bequest's unusual character alone. Olga had often written personal letters for her employer, who disliked typed correspondence and asked her to imitate her handwriting and sometimes sign her name. The practice gave Olga extensive opportunity to copy both the script and the signature; investigators suspected that she had taken the further step of trying to make a testamentary document pass as her employer's work.

The difference between an implausible inheritance and a forged instrument matters. Hercule Poirot explains that forgery is more serious than undue influence: the first concerns the document's authenticity, not merely the circumstances in which a genuine act of will might have been made. Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe's usual solicitors obtained expert opinions, questioned the young woman, and prepared to contest the document. Before proceedings reached court, Olga lost her nerve and disappeared, leaving some of her belongings behind. Her departure intensified suspicion, but it did not itself settle which paper had been signed or who had witnessed it.

A witness account and a second document

Harriet Leaman later describes an episode that initially seems to support the existence of a real codicil. On a day when Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe was unwell, she summoned Leaman and Jim, a young garden helper, to her room, where papers lay on the desk. She sent Olga out, explaining that the girl should not be involved in this part of the business, then covered the upper portion of a sheet with blotting paper. Leaman says she could see the lower part. Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe wrote several lines with the scratchy pen she habitually used, signed her name, and asked Leaman and Jim to write their names and addresses as witnesses.

Leaman's account is specific about what she says she saw: a woman writing and signing a paper in front of two witnesses. It does not, by itself, establish that this was the same document later submitted for probate, or reveal the obscured text. Her memory therefore complicates rather than resolves the case. The act she recounts may have been genuine, but its relationship to the forged codicil remains a separate question from whether Olga forged the document that received legal scrutiny.

The witness discrepancy and the codicil's significance

After telephoning Mr Fullerton, Hercule Poirot reports a decisive mismatch. The forged codicil produced for probate was witnessed not by Harriet Leaman but by Mary Doherty, a former servant who had recently died, and James Jenkins, the garden worker who had gone to Australia. Leaman's testimony identifies her and Jim as witnesses to the signing she remembers; the probate document names different witnesses. Poirot consequently observes that there seems to have been a real codicil as well as the forged one.

The available facts leave the real document's wording and legal effect uncertain. Leaman's recollection does not disclose the portion hidden by blotting paper, and the evidence presented does not establish that the genuine paper made the same bequest as the forged codicil. Nor does proof of a separate signing authenticate the document that was presented for probate. The narrative keeps these propositions apart: a witnessed act may have occurred; the extraordinary disposition to Olga may have appeared in the forged paper; and the witnesses named on that paper were not the witnesses Harriet Leaman remembers.

That separation makes the codicil both an inheritance instrument and a test of evidence. Its handwriting connects the forgery suspicion to Olga's ordinary work for Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe, while the divergent witness accounts expose how easily a remembered signing can be mistaken for proof of a particular document. What first appears to be one disputed paper thus opens into two questions: whether Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe made a genuine codicil, and whether the document used to claim her fortune was that codicil. The distinction sustains the mystery even after the forged character of the probate document has been established.