Bob Jameson had grown up in Galway and attended a boys’ school there, before studying history of art at Trinity College Dublin, followed by a master’s in Oxford. That explained the slightly plummy accent. I remembered that he’d met Mary when he was in Trinity. After college he’d worked for Oak Knap Investment Bank in London for several years before returning to Dublin to work full time in the charities sector after a stint with an Irish overseas development organization in Nigeria. He’d been head-hunted for the Nigerian charity after a chance meeting at a charity event he’d run in London while still working as a banker. He’d developed a bit of a talent for this side-line apparently. Art auctions, charity balls, races – it seemed that Bob Jameson was the man to go to if you wanted to raise a large amount of cash. He had endless charm and the ability to persuade the most unlikely people to donate, to prick their consciences. His contacts with the very wealthy through his day job at the bank had helped.

When he’d returned to Ireland from Nigeria, he’d worked for several different charities and served on the board of a number of hospitals – St Mary’s in Cork and St Finbarr’s Psychiatric Hospital in Galway were named – until eventually he’d committed himself to a charity he had founded himself, the Jameson Grace Charity for Alzheimer’s and dementia. As CEO he’d raised millions to build two separate Jameson Grace care homes in Sligo and Galway, and Dublin was next on the agenda. He was particularly noted for a highly publicized wills campaign to persuade people to include the Grace charity in their wills. Apparently Irish people, though generally a charitable bunch, weren’t so great when it came to bequests, so Bob had set about trying to change that.

I leaned back in the chair, rubbed my neck and stretched my arms over my head. I remembered that campaign, the stack of leaflets that arrived by post that we were asked to put in our waiting room. I’d thought about it at the time and chosen not to do it. I felt it was people’s own decision who they left their money to. I asked testators if they wanted a charitable bequest when taking instructions and regarded that as enough. I wasn’t sure about pushing them towards one particular charity by leaving the leaflets in the waiting room.