Ian's

Great Aunt, Millie

JOY (Scotland)

Le com new

Lee

Ian paterson gazed open- mouthed at the speaker. From the lips of the dry-as-dust lawyer had come the most incredible, the totally impossible statement. He must have mis-heard. That was it. He took a firm grip on himself.

"Er would you mind repeating that, please?"

"Not at all. When every- thing has been taken into ac- count - land, house, property, investments, cash at the bank - everything - and, after all duties and taxes have been paid - your great-aunt's legacy to you will still amount to something over a million pounds!"

Disjointedly, and not at all gracefully, Ian slid slowly to the floor, out to the world.

It all began on his eighteen- th birthday with a letter from a firm of solicitors in Edinburgh to Ian, alone in the world in his small flat in an outer sub- urb of London, asking whether he was the Ian Paterson who had had an elderly relative, a great-aunt, by name Millicent Mary McGregor, who was now deceased but had lived all her life near Edinburgh. If he had had such a relaive the writer requested him to reply, giving such proofs of the relationship

as he had readily available. Photocopies at that stage would be acceptable.

"What

speculated Ian

" can this be all about?" He was, indeed, of Edinburgh stock

his parents had moved south some fourteen years earlier when he was just four - but he didn't recall any elderly female rela- tives from that time. However, after considerable further think- ing he was ready to concede that perhaps, after all, he had heard talk of a Great Aunt- Millie from his parents when he was small. Not that this was a great deal of help really, since, his

parents (having been dead for several years) there still didn't seem to be any way of proving anything. But wait -per- haps Dad might still come up with an answer. He'd been an enthusuastic amateur photogra- pher since his very early years and if Great Aunt-Mille has actually existed - Dad's Aunt Millie she would be surely she might appear in some of his albums of prints.

And there she was! In lots of photos, starting long before Ian was born. In fact, in one shot, she held an infant cradled in her arms and the information under the print (in Dad's neat handwriting), claimed that the

infant was Ian himself. She looked to be in her early six- ties, then, but even so she still retained much of what would have been a glorious beauty in her youth. "Golly thought Ian, - she must have been gorgeous. Wish I'd have known her then."

As he sat gazing thought- fully at the print, it occurred to him that there might possibly be some material benefit in all this letters from lawyers regard- ing recently defunct relatives, quite often stemmed from wills and resulted in legacies. With renewed enthusiam he wrote a long explanatory letter to the Edinburgh lawyer and, after pur- chasing a few things from a near- by stor, enclosed photocopies of everything relevant he could pos- sibly think of a selection of birth, marriage and death cer- tificates, for a start.

Nothing happened for some days and Ian began to think that perhaps he'd got himself all worked up over nothing. But then the phone rang and a polite Scottish voice asked if he would be available the next day to receive a visitor from the law firm. But most certainly he would. In that case, the lawyer would call on him at about ten-thirty in the morn-