FORGERY "The facts that transpired in connection with this extraordinary case were sufficiently mysterious to puzzle everybody.

As I told you before, all Mr.Brooks' friends never quite grasped the idea that the old man should so completely have cut off his favourite son with the proverbial shilling.
"You see, Percival had always been a thorn in the old man's flesh.
Horse-racing, gambling, theatres, and music-halls were, in the old pork-butcher's eyes, so many deadly sins which his son committed every day of his life, and all the Fitzwilliam Place household could testify to the many and bitter quarrels which had arisen between father and son over the latter's gambling or racing debts.

Many people asserted that Brooks would sooner have left his money to charitable institutions than seen it squandered upon the brightest stars that adorned the music-hall stage.
"The case came up for hearing early in the autumn.

In the meanwhile Percival Brooks had given up his racecourse associates, settled down in the Fitzwilliam Place mansion, and conducted his father's business, without a manager, but with all the energy and forethought which he had previously devoted to more unworthy causes.
"Murray had elected not to stay on in the old house; no doubt associations were of too painful and recent a nature; he was boarding with the family of a Mr.Wilson Hibbert, who was the late Patrick Wethered's, the murdered lawyer's, partner.

They were quiet, homely people, who lived in a very pokey little house in Kilkenny Street, and poor Murray must, in spite of his grief, have felt very bitterly the change from his luxurious quarters in his father's mansion to his present tiny room and homely meals.
"Percival Brooks, who was now drawing an income of over a hundred thousand a year, was very severely criticised for adhering so strictly to the letter of his father's will, and only paying his brother that paltry L300 a year, which was very literally but the crumbs off his own magnificent dinner table.
"The issue of that contested will case was therefore awaited with eager interest.