Roger Bassington-ffrench forges John Savage’s will to seize his estate

Roger Bassington-ffrench’s relationship with John Savage is defined by calculated impersonation rather than mutual acquaintance. Roger and Moira Nicholson turned Savage’s interest in her into an opportunity to gain control of his wealth, then used a forged will and a staged account of his death to make the transfer appear legitimate. The scheme’s crucial weakness was also its method: the people who witnessed the will could not reliably establish that Savage himself had signed it.

The Scheme Against John Savage

Moira Nicholson met Savage while travelling as Mrs Templeton, a name she used amid the complications of her drug business. She knew he was enormously wealthy and pursued him, but Savage was not sufficiently attracted to abandon his common sense. Roger later described the two conspirators as devising a plan together, with Leo Cayman playing the part of an unfeeling husband to encourage Savage to visit Tudor Cottage. On Savage’s third visit, they put their plans into action; Moira took the money and ostensibly went abroad, while in reality returning to Staverley and the Grange.

The will formed a second part of the fraud. Frankie Derwent reasoned that Roger had impersonated Savage when the document was made, because Gladys Evans would have recognized that the signer was not her employer. In her reconstruction, the real Savage was drugged and confined—perhaps in an attic—while Roger performed the impersonation, then returned to his bed and given chloral. Gladys Evans found him dead the following morning. This sequence was initially a deduction, but Roger’s later account of the conspiracy and his admission that the will’s charitable provision was his own idea confirmed his role in shaping the fraud.

How the Will Was Made to Pass

The apparent legitimacy of the will rested on witnesses with little capacity to verify the signer’s identity. The lawyer was a stranger who had never met Savage but could testify that he had seen him sign. One witness, Rose Chudleigh, was considered unlikely to recognize that the man before her was an impostor; the other was an old man who was probably very short-sighted and may never have seen Savage at all. In this arrangement, the signatures and testimony supplied the appearance of verification without reliable personal recognition.

Frankie and Bobby Jones identified a possible way to test the deception: show Rose Chudleigh a photograph of the real Savage and ask whether he was the man who signed. Bobby doubted that she could make a dependable identification. Frankie also proposed that an expert might detect the forgery in the signature. The fraud had escaped scrutiny because, until doubts arose about the circumstances of Savage’s death, no one had an apparent reason to question when or how the will could have been forged.

The Estate, the Cover Story, and the Doubts

Roger’s account explains why the will distributed Savage’s fortune in a way that seemed plausible to outsiders but suspicious to Alan Carstairs. Savage was a hard-headed businessman, Carstairs believed, and would not naturally have left a vast sum to a woman he had recently met and the remainder to charity. Roger acknowledged that the charitable provision was his own idea: it made the arrangement sound respectable rather than suspicious. The will’s supposedly benevolent appearance was therefore part of its disguise.

Carstairs had learned of Mrs Templeton through a note Savage wrote aboard ship, which included her snapshot. After hearing of Savage’s death and will, he found the story unconvincing: he did not believe Savage feared cancer, and the will’s language struck him as unlike the businessman he knew. Carstairs came to investigate, threatening the concealment on which Roger’s scheme depended. The contrast is central to the relationship: Savage’s caution limited Moira Nicholson’s immediate hold over him, while Carstairs’s knowledge of Savage’s character exposed the gap between the man and the testament Roger had manufactured in his name.