Miles Kington: The enigmatic lives of Dame Isobel and Mr Futuwaya

He sometimes mesmerised colleagues by causing the colour of his teeth to change before their very eyes

There is a most curious trial going on in the High Court at the moment, in which an obituary writer stands accused of fraud. How on earth can an obituary writer commit fraud? Let us join the trial at a crucial moment and find out...

Counsel: Could you tell the court your name, please?

Defendant: Born on 8 July 1975 as Ursula Fairfax Bloom, to Arthur and Mary Bloom of Chatham in Kent, I was sent at an early age to Mrs Deepdene's nursery school for toddlers...

Counsel: Your name was all I required.

Defendant: I am sorry. My training as an obituarist obliges me to go into perhaps more detail than people need.

Counsel: You trained as an obituarist? There is training in that field?

Defendant: Oh, yes. I attended a two-year course in Obituaries and Final Notices at Milton Keynes University, formerly Milton Keynes Polytechnic, founded in 1946 by the former editor of The Undertaker, the monthly magazine...

Counsel: You're doing it again.

Defendant: I am sorry.

Counsel: What sort of things are inculcated into you as a budding obituarist?

Defendant: To be accurate without being tactless. To be honest and yet entertaining. To satisfy a dead man's enemies without alienating his surviving relatives. To tell a good story without entering the field of fiction...

Counsel: Ah ha! I rather think that brings us to 14 September 2003, does it not?

Defendant: Does it?

Counsel: I think it does. That was the day on which your paper printed an obituary of Kasho Futuwaya. A Japanese businessman, Mr Futuwaya, but not a run-of-the-mill businessman, as we learn from the obituary you wrote of him. For Mr Futuwaya was also a consummate magician, and often concluded favourable deals by swapping contracts at the last moment so that the other side signed a contract they had never seen before. Once, when meeting a top American politician, he caused the man's wife to disappear for half an hour. He sometimes mesmerised colleagues by causing the colour of his teeth to change in front of their very eyes, and once he cut open a grilled trout at a very important lunch and produced a gold ring from it which his boss had been wearing at the start of the meal...

Defendant: Yes, I remember it.

Counsel: It was a very entertaining account of Mr Futuwaya's life. There was only one thing wrong with the obituary, wasn't there, Miss Bloom? Mr Futuwaya had never existed, had he? There had never been a Japanese businessman who was also a skilled magician, had there?

Defendant: Not exactly.

Counsel: Not exactly? Not at all! There was nobody like him at all!

Defendant: How can you be sure? It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a Japanese man could be good both at conjuring and business...

Counsel: Ah, but this particular one you invented. As you did a week later with your obituary of Dame Isobel Harkness, the Australian explorer who had become the first woman to walk the length of the Andes and who also discovered a hitherto unknown colony of Breton-speaking fishermen in Patagonia.

Defendant: Yes, I...

Counsel: A mere fortnight later we come to Felt Tipping, the oddly named Lapp poet who became known as the Bard of the Reindeer, having written more than 14,000 poems about reindeer, including the rather racy "Ballad of Caribou Carl".

Defendant: Yes, I quite liked him.

Counsel: Miss Bloom, it is one thing to add fanciful details to an obituary which is perhaps thin on the ground. To fabricate entire people on a regular basis is taking dishonesty to a new level. You stand accused of deceiving the readership of a great paper, and, I may say, the editorship as well. Do you have any justification for this fraud?

Defendant: I most certainly do!

And what that is, we shall discover tomorrow.