The Waverly Tontine by Saul Isler
Colin Waverly tells the epic story of his father's shifty investment scheme, and what became of the capital.
If word of it had ever spread, Father's tontine would most certainly have become the most famous in history. But it had been held the darkest of secrets until I learned of it just this past week. Outside of its participants, I may be the only one to know of its provenance. And its stunning conclusion.
My name is Colin Waverly. My Father - God love him, he was a good one, but I hardly knew him - Richard Townshend Waverly, Dickie to his friends and colleagues, was the instigator of the Waverly Tontine. Thus its eponymous name.
Tontine? I presumed you understood. It's, well, a cross between a wager and a life insurance policy, but isn't a life insurance policy, after all, nothing more than a wager? One by which you deign to be the sole beneficiary.
What informed me of the Waverly Tontine was a wax-sealed, hand-written letter from Father which the tontine's solicitor and trustee, a young man name of Henry Jamieson, was instructed to deliver to me upon Father's death. Poor Father passed a month ago due to complications of Alzheimer's. The letter explained the intent of the tontine and listed its ten distinguished members. Each had belonged to Boodle's, the exclusive gentlemen's club founded in 1762 by the future PM, Lord Shelburne, in St. James, London.
Boodle's, named incongruously for its first headwaiter, Edward Boodle, was formed almost exclusively of peers, MPs and, later, captains of industry. Males only until 1982. Churchill was an honorary member, and Beau Brummell made his last bet at Boodle's before fleeing to France. Among Boodle's notoriously eccentric members, Father was seen to be, perhaps, the most eccentric. But all had one trait in common: uncommon wealth. If the Boodle's name strikes a familiar note, it's because it was taken, in 1847, by the famous British maker of dry gin.
Here's the story of the Waverly Tontine as pieced together from Father's long and astonishing letter. As all of its participants are with us no longer, its secret can now be revealed.
It was Father's idea to hand-pick a group of nine other Boodle's members, most of them retired, and suggest to them what he called an investment scheme. He did this during a lavish dinner behind locked doors at a private meeting salon in Mayfair's Connaught Hotel. When all were full of rare roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and partaking of their VSOP cognac and Upmann cigars, Father silenced them by tapping his knife on his near-empty snifter, then toasting to "friendship and long life." After a chorus of, "hear, hears" he laid out his clandestine scheme.
"Gentlemen, we, gathered here, are certainly the best of friends. And so it is to you, and only to you, my friends, that I make this unique proposal. Or call it, if you will, a friendly wager. I propose that we, as a group, purchase an insurance policy of sorts on our collective lives. The amount of the policy - the wager - shall be ten million pounds. That is, we shall put up one million pounds sterling per man."
Father paused here to survey the faces around the table and allow the number to register. Bemused looks were all he saw. "This amount," he continued, "would be invested in a trust, an interest-bearing and/or capital gains scheme that would hopefully produce perhaps multiples of our investment. Who shall be the single beneficiary of this sacred trust? Why, the last man standing - the last to die - that is who. And that, my dear sirs - and you are not only dear, several among you are sirs - is the entirety of my scheme. May I hear your comments?"
The room went silent for a long moment as the peers and KBEs and business titans pondered what their ears had just heard. Clouds of cigar smoke mingled with clouds of thought. If they were fazed, it was certainly more by the concept of the scheme than the poundage called for.
"Dickie, old chap, I do believe you're suggesting what is referred to as a tontine. Rather illegal, mightn't you say?" This from Colonel Alfred Demingsworth, A Korean war hero, now head of the Royal Bank of Winchester.
"And when," Father replied, "has a little illegality ever stopped any of us from whatever we damn well please to do, Alfy?" The good colonel was father's best friend.
Through the laughter, came another remark, this from the staid Sir Reginald Schreiberman, who owned half the newspapers and TV stations in England. "I've been running some numbers in my head, Richard. You seem to have selected us for the relative sameness of our ages. We are, I suspect, within two - three years at most - of each other, are we not? Was that the key factor in your selecting us?"
"That, Reggie, and the fact that none of you serfs would miss a million or so. It would hardly be cricket, of course, if I'd selected anyone ten or more years younger, would it now?"
Lord Cyril Pemberton - Baron Pemberton - next. "My good fellow, I must commend you for the most interesting scheme any Boodle's fellow has proposed in years. Frankly, I'd love to have such an extra incentive to extend my years. But, while it would be a most welcome windfall to collect a multiple of ten million if one were to be, as you so neatly put it, 'the last man standing,' I frankly doubt it would build the estate of anyone here more than perhaps five percent. Furthermore..."
"My dear Lord Baron," interrupted Father, "you're being more Upper House windblown than usual. Please, man, do get to your point."
"All right, Dickie, here it is. I welcome, if not your unkind wit, your scheme. I believe it a sound one. Only, in for a penny, in for a pound. I motion that we make it truly interesting; that we each put up five million." Murmurs circled the room. When they subsided, the good baron asked, "Do I hear a second?" Father stood at his place smiling, arms crossed.
"Seconded," Abel McLemore chimed in, almost without hesitation, picking up upon the parliamentary turn the discussion had taken. As head of one of Britain's largest hedge funds, he was a man accustomed to making quick decisions; to investing millions within seconds. More murmuring. A bit of grumbling as well.
Father then held up his hand for silence and said, "Gentlemen, the motion has been made and seconded to enter our scheme at five million pounds sterling per man. But before we take a vote, it would behoove us to open the floor for further discussion.
Minor points and objections were raised. A half hour and another round of cognac later, Father clinked his glass again, repeated the motion and called for a vote. Nine hands slowly rose, including his own. The one that didn't belonged to Amos Feathersleigh, Esq., a noted barrister to the film industry and owner of a small but profitable chain of boutique hotels. He had dozed off after his fifth cognac. Awakened and informed of what the rest were up to, he added his yea and returned to his stentorian slumber. Three days later, with all transfers of funds made to the private trust created and overseen by Jamieson, the Waverly Tontine was afloat. The year was 1998.
Not three days after the tontine's founding, Thierry Ames, who'd amassed five long distance trucking companies and the UK's largest trash-hauling firm, died. He was a man whose speech still revealed his cockney upbringing and who still insisted on calling himself a lorryman because that's what he'd been for the first sixteen years of his working life. He'd sustained a sudden massive heart attack while watching a championship football match between Manchester United and Arsenal at Wembley Stadium, and was dead before the ambulance arrived.
Nothing more happened for over a year until Cyril Pemberton, the same Baron Pemberton who'd upped the stakes to five million a man, was taken with pancreatic cancer and was gone within seven weeks. Two years later, in 2001, Sir Conrad P. Bailey-Hobbes, a Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences and husband of the reputedly richest and meanest woman in all of Wales, was killed, along with the woman seated next to him - not his wife - in a five-car car crash caused by him while misreading the hills above Biarritz.
No deaths occurred for another three years. The odds of anyone winning his wager on longevity, now worth £91.6 million, had dropped to 7 to 1. But in that year, 2004, two more died, Abel McLemore, from a galloping diabetes, and Sir Milton Schreiberman, also from a heart attack. Half of the tontine members were now gone.
Upon the third Thursday of each December, the survivors of the Waverly Tontine, anxious to keep their "rather illegal" scheme under wraps, had been meeting secretly at the Connaught to dine mightily and assess their burgeoning "investment." By the oddest of coincidences, at the seventh-year dinner in 2005, land baron Simon L. Ramsay IV, unable to dislodge a pheasant bone from his throat, perished from asphyxiation on the way to hospital. In his absence, and after a minute of silence to wish him the best, the meeting continued. The tontine's balance sheet indicated a value £92.3 million and climbing.
Only seven years had passed. It was now 2006. The survivors, including Father, numbered only four, their ages ranging from 78 to 80. Father, though in excellent health was - it's difficult for me even to say this - the very next to die, and in a most shocking fashion. He and his companion, Madame Elyse Borcheron, a lovely French woman - my mother had passed several years earlier - and two other couples were sailing on his yacht off Ibiza when a squalling rainstorm suddenly arose. As Father joined his crew in battening down, his foot slipped, he fell overboard and was drowned. Search crews, overseen by me, sought for a full week, unsuccessfully, to find his body.
So Dickie Waverly - my father - was the scheme's seventh victim. But the Waverly Tontine was still quite alive. Seventeen months later, Amos Feathersleigh, he who'd fallen asleep at the tontine's first meeting, sustained a traveling blood clot which caused a lethal stroke, thus making him the tontine's eighth to die. Only two now remained: Colonel Alfred Demingsworth, Father's best friend, and Thomas "Tommy" Atherton, arrogant successor to his father as chairman of Atherton Airways, a company that leased jets to the semi-wealthy who couldn't quite afford their own. Two years after Father's passing, Alfy came down with what at first appeared to be a simple flu, but which escalated to a double pneumonia and his lamented death a week following.
Hardly lamented by Tommy Atherton.
With the demise of its ninth member, nearly ten years after its establishment, the Waverly Tontine had come to its own demise. The tenth man, the last man standing, was Tommy Atherton. Profligate that he was, had never worked a day in his life until given Daddy's airplanes to play with. Atherton Airways, under his misguidance, had been about to go under when Colonel Demingsworth conveniently contracted his pneumonia, leaving Tommy the tontine's winner.
Then the most unlikely thing occurred. Not two days after being informed of his windfall our Tommy boy was accosted by a thief who emerged from an alley off of Eaton Terrace in Belgravia. Before Atherton could hand over his wallet, he was shot dead, murdered not a day after he was to collect his winnings, topped off now, in spite of the 2008 crash, at a neat £102.2 million.
But into Henry Jamieson's mind must have crept another thought. The Waverly Tontine was still, he was certain, a secret. What if he were to keep it a secret? What if he were to keep the Waverly Trust funds altogether? After all, wasn't he the only one now who knew of it? And had access to it? And hadn't he overseen its rise from fifty to over a hundred million pounds? Didn't he deserve far more than a paltry million or so for his services? He would, of course, have to devise a highly clever, undetectable method of draining the trust and passing its funds to himself. But he prided himself on being a highly clever man. This was Jamieson's distracted thinking as he approached the door of his offices.
Where a yet more unlikely thing occurred.
A man, wearing a Burberry raincoat and a felt hat draped low over his face, was standing there, a stranger to Jamieson. Waiting for him was an old man, adorned by a long grey beard and still very much alive: Richard Townshend Waverly.
Without so much as a handshake or a how-do-you-do, and to make certain that Jamieson would know exactly who he was, Father grabbed the solicitor's hand, slapped his identification papers into it, then, on the spot, declared his legitimate claim to the Waverly Tontine funds.
Jamieson, had no choice but to honor Father's claim and his demand that the funds be placed in a new trust with himself as the sole beneficiary until, upon his passing, the proceeds of the trust would pass, per stirpes, to me. Forthwith, the shocked solicitor sat down to prepare the proper transfer papers.
You must be wondering about the convenient timing of Father's reappearance. A substantial landowner and housing developer, Father had had several reversals prior to his supposedly accidental death. Among the last was the unfortunate discovery of extensive toxic waste deposits under the vast parcel of land upon which he had nearly completed development of a 3,000 home, gated community of rowhouses close on Hampshire's shores. Its forced closure forced him to contemplate a declaration of bankruptcy, as he was unable to repay imminently due loans. The shame of impending bankruptcy - of his ruination - was driving him to madness. That's when he sought to at least temporarily escape his woes by taking his little yachting sojourn on the Mediterranean.
He saw the storm as a gift from God. When it came up, as one often did at that time of year, he took advantage of it to "fall" overboard. He swam to a dinghy tied abaft of the yacht, undid its painter line and hung on to the dinghy's side as it was blown adrift. The storm was such that no one spotted him doing this. Paddling to a secluded cove on Ibiza, five nautical miles off, he quickly made to disappear from his debts. And from me.
Father took himself, by tramp steamer, to Australia, and thence to its outback where he was known as Henrik Coover, an eremitic, sheep-farming emigré from South Africa. What kept him alive during those lean years was his covetous desire to outlast the remaining few members of the tontine and collect what would then be due him.
He followed their lives closely on the Internet. When his dear friend, Alfy Demingsworth, succumbed to pneumonia, and the trustee, Henry Jamieson, was about to declare the insufferable Sir Thomas Atherton as the survivor of the Waverly Tontine, Father knew he must make his move. He would simply return to England and find a way to dispense with Sir Thomas before any transfer of funds could be made. He flew back to England the very day he learned of his friend, Alfy's death, did the deed with a Walther Special, and got away with it in the bargain.
Though he hated himself for killing Atherton, he hardly regretted the deed. Nonetheless, still feeling shame, and fearing worse - detection - he returned to his sheep farm in Australia and remained there until his own death last week.
I had moved to Paris and thus never knew Father had survived his "accident" until Father's attorney called to inform me of it and the bequest that went along with it: £124.6 million.
The Waverly was a one-off in the tontine history of Mother England. But it was nothing compared to the scheme that followed, the one dreamed up and executed by my one-off father.
What more can I say?
Other than thank you.
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My name is Colin Waverly. My Father - God love him, he was a good one, but I hardly knew him - Richard Townshend Waverly, Dickie to his friends and colleagues, was the instigator of the Waverly Tontine. Thus its eponymous name.
Tontine? I presumed you understood. It's, well, a cross between a wager and a life insurance policy, but isn't a life insurance policy, after all, nothing more than a wager? One by which you deign to be the sole beneficiary.
What informed me of the Waverly Tontine was a wax-sealed, hand-written letter from Father which the tontine's solicitor and trustee, a young man name of Henry Jamieson, was instructed to deliver to me upon Father's death. Poor Father passed a month ago due to complications of Alzheimer's. The letter explained the intent of the tontine and listed its ten distinguished members. Each had belonged to Boodle's, the exclusive gentlemen's club founded in 1762 by the future PM, Lord Shelburne, in St. James, London.
Boodle's, named incongruously for its first headwaiter, Edward Boodle, was formed almost exclusively of peers, MPs and, later, captains of industry. Males only until 1982. Churchill was an honorary member, and Beau Brummell made his last bet at Boodle's before fleeing to France. Among Boodle's notoriously eccentric members, Father was seen to be, perhaps, the most eccentric. But all had one trait in common: uncommon wealth. If the Boodle's name strikes a familiar note, it's because it was taken, in 1847, by the famous British maker of dry gin.
Here's the story of the Waverly Tontine as pieced together from Father's long and astonishing letter. As all of its participants are with us no longer, its secret can now be revealed.
It was Father's idea to hand-pick a group of nine other Boodle's members, most of them retired, and suggest to them what he called an investment scheme. He did this during a lavish dinner behind locked doors at a private meeting salon in Mayfair's Connaught Hotel. When all were full of rare roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and partaking of their VSOP cognac and Upmann cigars, Father silenced them by tapping his knife on his near-empty snifter, then toasting to "friendship and long life." After a chorus of, "hear, hears" he laid out his clandestine scheme.
"Gentlemen, we, gathered here, are certainly the best of friends. And so it is to you, and only to you, my friends, that I make this unique proposal. Or call it, if you will, a friendly wager. I propose that we, as a group, purchase an insurance policy of sorts on our collective lives. The amount of the policy - the wager - shall be ten million pounds. That is, we shall put up one million pounds sterling per man."
Father paused here to survey the faces around the table and allow the number to register. Bemused looks were all he saw. "This amount," he continued, "would be invested in a trust, an interest-bearing and/or capital gains scheme that would hopefully produce perhaps multiples of our investment. Who shall be the single beneficiary of this sacred trust? Why, the last man standing - the last to die - that is who. And that, my dear sirs - and you are not only dear, several among you are sirs - is the entirety of my scheme. May I hear your comments?"
The room went silent for a long moment as the peers and KBEs and business titans pondered what their ears had just heard. Clouds of cigar smoke mingled with clouds of thought. If they were fazed, it was certainly more by the concept of the scheme than the poundage called for.
"Dickie, old chap, I do believe you're suggesting what is referred to as a tontine. Rather illegal, mightn't you say?" This from Colonel Alfred Demingsworth, A Korean war hero, now head of the Royal Bank of Winchester.
"And when," Father replied, "has a little illegality ever stopped any of us from whatever we damn well please to do, Alfy?" The good colonel was father's best friend.
Through the laughter, came another remark, this from the staid Sir Reginald Schreiberman, who owned half the newspapers and TV stations in England. "I've been running some numbers in my head, Richard. You seem to have selected us for the relative sameness of our ages. We are, I suspect, within two - three years at most - of each other, are we not? Was that the key factor in your selecting us?"
"That, Reggie, and the fact that none of you serfs would miss a million or so. It would hardly be cricket, of course, if I'd selected anyone ten or more years younger, would it now?"
Lord Cyril Pemberton - Baron Pemberton - next. "My good fellow, I must commend you for the most interesting scheme any Boodle's fellow has proposed in years. Frankly, I'd love to have such an extra incentive to extend my years. But, while it would be a most welcome windfall to collect a multiple of ten million if one were to be, as you so neatly put it, 'the last man standing,' I frankly doubt it would build the estate of anyone here more than perhaps five percent. Furthermore..."
"My dear Lord Baron," interrupted Father, "you're being more Upper House windblown than usual. Please, man, do get to your point."
"All right, Dickie, here it is. I welcome, if not your unkind wit, your scheme. I believe it a sound one. Only, in for a penny, in for a pound. I motion that we make it truly interesting; that we each put up five million." Murmurs circled the room. When they subsided, the good baron asked, "Do I hear a second?" Father stood at his place smiling, arms crossed.
"Seconded," Abel McLemore chimed in, almost without hesitation, picking up upon the parliamentary turn the discussion had taken. As head of one of Britain's largest hedge funds, he was a man accustomed to making quick decisions; to investing millions within seconds. More murmuring. A bit of grumbling as well.
Father then held up his hand for silence and said, "Gentlemen, the motion has been made and seconded to enter our scheme at five million pounds sterling per man. But before we take a vote, it would behoove us to open the floor for further discussion.
Minor points and objections were raised. A half hour and another round of cognac later, Father clinked his glass again, repeated the motion and called for a vote. Nine hands slowly rose, including his own. The one that didn't belonged to Amos Feathersleigh, Esq., a noted barrister to the film industry and owner of a small but profitable chain of boutique hotels. He had dozed off after his fifth cognac. Awakened and informed of what the rest were up to, he added his yea and returned to his stentorian slumber. Three days later, with all transfers of funds made to the private trust created and overseen by Jamieson, the Waverly Tontine was afloat. The year was 1998.
Not three days after the tontine's founding, Thierry Ames, who'd amassed five long distance trucking companies and the UK's largest trash-hauling firm, died. He was a man whose speech still revealed his cockney upbringing and who still insisted on calling himself a lorryman because that's what he'd been for the first sixteen years of his working life. He'd sustained a sudden massive heart attack while watching a championship football match between Manchester United and Arsenal at Wembley Stadium, and was dead before the ambulance arrived.
Nothing more happened for over a year until Cyril Pemberton, the same Baron Pemberton who'd upped the stakes to five million a man, was taken with pancreatic cancer and was gone within seven weeks. Two years later, in 2001, Sir Conrad P. Bailey-Hobbes, a Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences and husband of the reputedly richest and meanest woman in all of Wales, was killed, along with the woman seated next to him - not his wife - in a five-car car crash caused by him while misreading the hills above Biarritz.
No deaths occurred for another three years. The odds of anyone winning his wager on longevity, now worth £91.6 million, had dropped to 7 to 1. But in that year, 2004, two more died, Abel McLemore, from a galloping diabetes, and Sir Milton Schreiberman, also from a heart attack. Half of the tontine members were now gone.
Upon the third Thursday of each December, the survivors of the Waverly Tontine, anxious to keep their "rather illegal" scheme under wraps, had been meeting secretly at the Connaught to dine mightily and assess their burgeoning "investment." By the oddest of coincidences, at the seventh-year dinner in 2005, land baron Simon L. Ramsay IV, unable to dislodge a pheasant bone from his throat, perished from asphyxiation on the way to hospital. In his absence, and after a minute of silence to wish him the best, the meeting continued. The tontine's balance sheet indicated a value £92.3 million and climbing.
Only seven years had passed. It was now 2006. The survivors, including Father, numbered only four, their ages ranging from 78 to 80. Father, though in excellent health was - it's difficult for me even to say this - the very next to die, and in a most shocking fashion. He and his companion, Madame Elyse Borcheron, a lovely French woman - my mother had passed several years earlier - and two other couples were sailing on his yacht off Ibiza when a squalling rainstorm suddenly arose. As Father joined his crew in battening down, his foot slipped, he fell overboard and was drowned. Search crews, overseen by me, sought for a full week, unsuccessfully, to find his body.
So Dickie Waverly - my father - was the scheme's seventh victim. But the Waverly Tontine was still quite alive. Seventeen months later, Amos Feathersleigh, he who'd fallen asleep at the tontine's first meeting, sustained a traveling blood clot which caused a lethal stroke, thus making him the tontine's eighth to die. Only two now remained: Colonel Alfred Demingsworth, Father's best friend, and Thomas "Tommy" Atherton, arrogant successor to his father as chairman of Atherton Airways, a company that leased jets to the semi-wealthy who couldn't quite afford their own. Two years after Father's passing, Alfy came down with what at first appeared to be a simple flu, but which escalated to a double pneumonia and his lamented death a week following.
Hardly lamented by Tommy Atherton.
With the demise of its ninth member, nearly ten years after its establishment, the Waverly Tontine had come to its own demise. The tenth man, the last man standing, was Tommy Atherton. Profligate that he was, had never worked a day in his life until given Daddy's airplanes to play with. Atherton Airways, under his misguidance, had been about to go under when Colonel Demingsworth conveniently contracted his pneumonia, leaving Tommy the tontine's winner.
Then the most unlikely thing occurred. Not two days after being informed of his windfall our Tommy boy was accosted by a thief who emerged from an alley off of Eaton Terrace in Belgravia. Before Atherton could hand over his wallet, he was shot dead, murdered not a day after he was to collect his winnings, topped off now, in spite of the 2008 crash, at a neat £102.2 million.
But into Henry Jamieson's mind must have crept another thought. The Waverly Tontine was still, he was certain, a secret. What if he were to keep it a secret? What if he were to keep the Waverly Trust funds altogether? After all, wasn't he the only one now who knew of it? And had access to it? And hadn't he overseen its rise from fifty to over a hundred million pounds? Didn't he deserve far more than a paltry million or so for his services? He would, of course, have to devise a highly clever, undetectable method of draining the trust and passing its funds to himself. But he prided himself on being a highly clever man. This was Jamieson's distracted thinking as he approached the door of his offices.
Where a yet more unlikely thing occurred.
A man, wearing a Burberry raincoat and a felt hat draped low over his face, was standing there, a stranger to Jamieson. Waiting for him was an old man, adorned by a long grey beard and still very much alive: Richard Townshend Waverly.
Without so much as a handshake or a how-do-you-do, and to make certain that Jamieson would know exactly who he was, Father grabbed the solicitor's hand, slapped his identification papers into it, then, on the spot, declared his legitimate claim to the Waverly Tontine funds.
Jamieson, had no choice but to honor Father's claim and his demand that the funds be placed in a new trust with himself as the sole beneficiary until, upon his passing, the proceeds of the trust would pass, per stirpes, to me. Forthwith, the shocked solicitor sat down to prepare the proper transfer papers.
You must be wondering about the convenient timing of Father's reappearance. A substantial landowner and housing developer, Father had had several reversals prior to his supposedly accidental death. Among the last was the unfortunate discovery of extensive toxic waste deposits under the vast parcel of land upon which he had nearly completed development of a 3,000 home, gated community of rowhouses close on Hampshire's shores. Its forced closure forced him to contemplate a declaration of bankruptcy, as he was unable to repay imminently due loans. The shame of impending bankruptcy - of his ruination - was driving him to madness. That's when he sought to at least temporarily escape his woes by taking his little yachting sojourn on the Mediterranean.
He saw the storm as a gift from God. When it came up, as one often did at that time of year, he took advantage of it to "fall" overboard. He swam to a dinghy tied abaft of the yacht, undid its painter line and hung on to the dinghy's side as it was blown adrift. The storm was such that no one spotted him doing this. Paddling to a secluded cove on Ibiza, five nautical miles off, he quickly made to disappear from his debts. And from me.
Father took himself, by tramp steamer, to Australia, and thence to its outback where he was known as Henrik Coover, an eremitic, sheep-farming emigré from South Africa. What kept him alive during those lean years was his covetous desire to outlast the remaining few members of the tontine and collect what would then be due him.
He followed their lives closely on the Internet. When his dear friend, Alfy Demingsworth, succumbed to pneumonia, and the trustee, Henry Jamieson, was about to declare the insufferable Sir Thomas Atherton as the survivor of the Waverly Tontine, Father knew he must make his move. He would simply return to England and find a way to dispense with Sir Thomas before any transfer of funds could be made. He flew back to England the very day he learned of his friend, Alfy's death, did the deed with a Walther Special, and got away with it in the bargain.
Though he hated himself for killing Atherton, he hardly regretted the deed. Nonetheless, still feeling shame, and fearing worse - detection - he returned to his sheep farm in Australia and remained there until his own death last week.
I had moved to Paris and thus never knew Father had survived his "accident" until Father's attorney called to inform me of it and the bequest that went along with it: £124.6 million.
The Waverly was a one-off in the tontine history of Mother England. But it was nothing compared to the scheme that followed, the one dreamed up and executed by my one-off father.
What more can I say?
Other than thank you.
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