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Prologue
Live in the moment, and try not to die while doing it.
Matthew Aloysius Devlin
Ruby Graham stepped out of the tube at Hammersmith Broadway on a Thursday morning in March and adjusted her sunglasses to quell the headache detonating in her frontal lobe.
Commuters barged past her, cutting through the pedestrian traffic with the grim determination of First World War squaddies leaping from the trenches.
She forced herself to move, instead of standing like a dummy at the tube entrance – causing a pavement pile-up was not going to bring back her soul mate or unbreak her heart.
I miss you so much you daft old sod, why did you have to die?
She sniffed down the sob cueing up in her throat as she headed along Shepherd’s Bush Road.
No more tears, Ruby, all they do is make you look like a badger.
If she tried hard enough, maybe she could hear Matty laughing at himself and the ridiculousness of being struck down with congestive heart failure in his flat above The Royale Cinema, instead of dying while cliff diving in Acapulco, or motorbiking across the Sahara desert or participating in one of the many other ‘marvellous adventures’ that had made up his life.
She dug her iPhone out of her pocket and reread the email she’d received the day after Matty’s death. The email she’d ignored in the last ten days while getting the million and one things done that came with an unexpected death. Unfortunately, she couldn’t ignore it any longer, because the appointment was today.
She lowered her sunglasses to double-check the address.
Peter Ryker, Solicitor, Ryker, Wells and Associates, 121a Shepherd’s Bush Road.
She stopped at a doorway jammed between a kebab shop and a florist and pressed the bell for the first floor.
The muffled ring drilled into her skull and she cursed her lemon-tini binge at yesterday’s wake for the five hundredth time since she’d woken up in Matty’s tiny flat above The Royale an hour ago amid a pile of debris worthy of Glastonbury.
Note to self: catastrophic hangovers and grief do not make great bedfellows. Especially when you still have the reading of the will to get through.
The intercom buzzed and she whispered her name, so as not to wake the sleeping dragon that had only been temporarily tamed by the cocktail of extra-strength painkillers she’d found in Matty’s medicine cabinet.
She climbed the narrow staircase to the first floor, praying on each creaky tread that Matty hadn’t lined up too many shocking reveals for this afternoon’s entertainment. Given Matty’s addiction to showmanship and the fact he appeared to have stage-managed the reading of the will scene from The Grand Budapest Hotel, she wasn’t holding out too much hope.
Ruby’s stress downgraded when she reached Peter Ryker’s office to find an open airy space, the clean lines of the modern furniture highlighted by the comforting view through the Victorian bay window of Brook Green – and no sign of Ralph Fiennes anywhere. Ryker stood when she entered and came from behind his desk. A slim man in his fifties, he wore an expertly tailored slate-grey suit, his warm smile contradicting his conservative appearance.
‘Miss Graham, thank you so much for coming.’ He shook her hand in a firm grip, the easy confidence in his manner matched by the cosy chestnut brown of his eyes.
Ruby’s lungs squeezed, Ryker’s paternal smile reminding her of Matty – and everything that would be missing in her life from now on.
No Matty to make her laugh at some daft exploit from his youth. No Matty to pore over the relative merits of Easter Parade versus Monty Python’s The Life of Brian for The Royale’s Good Friday screening. No Matty to share a spiced caramel latte with while they debated the next quarter’s schedule of gala events. No Matty to be there for her when she needed a shoulder to lean on. Or a person to tell her they were proud of her. Or even a hopeless romantic with Cupid delusions who insisted on trying to fix her up with guys he fancied, most of whom turned out to be gay.
She dragged in a breath past the boulder in her throat that had taken on asteroid proportions during yesterday morning’s service at the Golders Green Crematorium. Time to stop fixating on the prospect of her life with no Matty in it and concentrate on the irony that she was even going to miss those terrible blind dates Matty had been fixing her up with ever since she’d turned twenty-one.
‘Sorry, if I’m a bit late,’ she managed to mumble to Ryker.
‘Not a problem.’ He touched her arm as he let go of her hand, the welcoming smile faltering. ‘And let me say, I’m so sorry for your loss. Matty was such a character, I’m sure we’ll all miss him immensely.’
She nodded as her eyeballs began to sting and the asteroid in her throat head-butted her tonsils.
Ryker indicated a chair on the left side of his desk. ‘Why don’t you take a seat so we can begin.’
Remembering her sunglasses, she slipped them off and stuffed them in her bag.
She and Matty had never discussed what would happen in the eventuality of his death for the simple reason that he had been fit and healthy and only in his early fifties – and neither of them had known he had an undiagnosed heart condition. Because it was, well, undiagnosed. She choked down the asteroid, which was expanding again. That Matty had written a will at all was news to her when she’d gotten Ryker’s email.
But whatever the will contained, her only objective now was to keep The Royale open for business. The small, and only slightly dilapidated art-house cinema in north, north Notting Hill had been Matty’s life and his legacy – and it was all she had left of him.
She crossed to the chair Ryker had indicated as he stepped behind her to close the office door. But as she shifted round to place her bum on the seat, she stiffened and bolted upright.
The trickle of blood still left in her head flooded into her cheeks as she spotted the man sitting in the chair behind the door.
