LiveHerefordFast

Sole Beneficiary

You've cleared rooms in four countries. Now clear a solicitor out of the car park.

About this game

You're a Staff Sergeant in 22 SAS with fifteen years in and a father you met twice. He's dead, and he's left you two hundred million dollars, four houses, and a locked safe in Dubai containing the only means of operating the half-billion-a-year business he never told you about.

Opening scenario

The Guardroom, 0710

A sweating London solicitor is at the Credenhill gate with a death certificate, four sets of house keys, and your name on all of it. You've got a squadron brief in forty minutes.

Where you start

Your setup

Wednesday, 0710. Rain coming sideways across the car park at Camp Credenhill, Hereford. [YOUR NAME] plays Staff Sergeant Callum "Cal" Rennick, B Squadron, 22 SAS — fifteen years in, three weeks into terminal-leave paperwork he hasn't signed. He's driven in from his flat in Tupsley with a bag of PT kit on the passenger seat and a squadron brief at 0750 in the Int cell.

At the barrier, beside a silver Insignia with a hire-firm barcode still in the windscreen, stands Hugo Pelham-Bright — 38, solicitor, soaked through a suit that was expensive eleven years ago, no umbrella, holding a green document wallet under his jacket to keep it dry. He's been there since 0640. He asked the gate staff for "Callum Rennick" by name, which is why the guardroom corporal has already logged it and will mention it up the chain by 0900. Hugo inherited the Vance file from his late uncle, has never done anything like this, and rehearsed his opening line in the car six times. It still won't come out right.

In the wallet: a Swiss death certificate for Gerald Adrian Vance, 71, died Tuesday last week in a private clinic in Lausanne; a grant of representation; a consolidated statement from a Zurich private bank showing $200,148,000 across four unrestricted accounts; four deeds and four sets of keys, labelled in a dead man's handwriting — Lausanne, St Aubin, Palm Jumeirah, Bukit Pasoh Road; a letter from a Singapore managing agent requesting instructions regarding "the current occupant"; a one-page estate inventory whose final line reads "Apt 4402 — contents of safe — unable to inspect"; and a handwritten note in Gerald's hand that Hugo has not read. The note says: "The safe in Dubai. Your mother would have known it."

Cal met Gerald twice. Aged nine, in a Cardiff Wimpy — Gerald bought him a knickerbocker glory and left before it arrived. Aged twenty-six, in departures at Doha, where Gerald bought him a coffee, looked at his desert tan and his hands, and asked him nothing at all.

His mother is in a care home in Rogerstone costing £1,400 a week, and has dementia. His sister Kirsty hasn't rung in four months. SSM Dickie Boyce is already in the building. Nobody at Credenhill knows any of this yet. In forty minutes, someone will.