My Father’s Handwriting

Forensic document examination is not graphology and Dr Sabine Achebe corrects this in the first ninety seconds of every consultation, because the confusion costs her credibility and because graphology is nonsense.

Graphology claims to read personality from handwriting. It cannot.

Document examination compares questioned writing against known specimens and reports the degree of correspondence in habitual features — pen lifts, line quality, letter construction, ratios, the exit stroke on a terminal 'y' — features that a writer cannot suppress and a forger cannot fully reproduce.

It is boring and it is defensible and Sabine has given evidence in one hundred and nine cases.

The document

It came in a bundle from a probate solicitor in Aberdeen. Contested estate; two siblings; a holographic will dated 1994 that one side says is genuine and the other says is not.

Sabine's job is the will. There are eleven known specimens for comparison.

She works blind where she can — she does not read the content first, because content creates expectation — and she began, as always, with line quality at magnification.

Four minutes in she stopped.

The exit stroke on the terminal 'y'. A very specific thing: a shallow left-turning hook that does not close, produced by a writer who was taught a particular copperplate model in a particular decade in a particular part of West Africa, and which Sabine has seen perhaps three times professionally.

And several thousand times on birthday cards.

Her father

Emeka Achebe came to Britain in 1974, worked in a factory in Coventry until 1991, and died in 2009.

He wrote to his sister in Enugu every fortnight for thirty-five years.

He also, from 1988, wrote out the labels for the shop on Bell Street, and the notices for the church hall, and — this is the part that matters and that Sabine did not think about for thirty years — a very large number of documents for other people.

Because a lot of the men he worked with could not write English well, and Emeka could, beautifully, in a hand that people commented on, and so for about two decades he was the man you went to in that part of Coventry when you needed something written properly.

Tenancy letters. Complaints to the council. Applications. References.

And, Sabine now realises, standing in her own lab at fifty-three, wills.

The problem

The will in front of her is dated 1994 and was written in Aberdeen by a man named Duncan Stroud, who was, according to the file, a retired fitter with no connection to Coventry, no connection to Nigeria, and no plausible connection to Emeka Achebe.

And it is in her father's hand.

Not similar to. Sabine has spent thirty-one years learning the difference between similar-to and the-same-writer, and this is the same writer, and she can demonstrate it on eleven features, and she could defend it in court.

What she did first

She did the correct thing, which was to declare a conflict and hand the case to a colleague.

That took four minutes and one email and it was not difficult.

What she has done since is not the correct thing.

What she found

Duncan Stroud lived in Aberdeen from 1996. Before that he lived in Coventry.

He worked, from 1979 to 1991, at the same factory.

The 1994 will was written the year Stroud's wife died, two years before he moved north, and it leaves everything to a daughter who is now the contesting party, and the reason the other side says it is a forgery is that it is "not in the deceased's handwriting."

They are correct. It is not.

It is in the handwriting of a man Stroud worked beside for twelve years, who wrote things for people, and who — Sabine would put money on this and cannot prove it — sat at a kitchen table in Coventry in 1994 and wrote down what a grieving fitter told him to write, because that is what he did, because that is who he was, and because it did not occur to either of them that this would ever matter.

The legal position

A holographic will must be in the testator's own hand. This one is not.

Sabine's colleague will report that. It is the truth and it is the only report the evidence supports.

The daughter will very likely lose.

The other thing

There are eleven known specimens of Duncan Stroud's writing in the bundle and Sabine has looked at all of them, which she should not have done, and one of them is a note from 1994 in a shaky, laboured, semi-legible hand.

It says: Emeka — thank you for Tuesday. I could not have.

It stops there. Mid-sentence.

Sabine has read it a great many times.

Her father never mentioned it. He never mentioned any of it. She grew up thinking of the writing as a party trick — the neat hand, the thing people admired — and she became a document examiner because of it, which she has said in three interviews as a charming origin story.

She did not know he had been doing this.

She does not know how many.

Now

The report goes out on Friday. It will be accurate.

Sabine has drafted an email to the solicitor four times, offering context that is not evidence and that is not admissible and that nobody has asked for.

She has not sent it.

She has, instead, started going through her aunt's letters — thirty-five years of them, returned to the family in 2011, in a box she has never fully read.

She is looking for other hands.