The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club, #5)

by Richard Osman

Joanna is having the small wedding she has always wanted, and I am having the big wedding I have always wanted. Sometimes it pays to be different from your children.

Elizabeth is always alone now. Always alone, and never alone: that was grief.

Elizabeth had been ready to say no to this wedding. To stay at home and read. To look over at Stephen’s chair. To punish herself. But she’d said yes instead. Something told her it was time to start again. She thought perhaps it was the prospect of seeing love at first hand, but, no, it was far better than that. It was a best man with a death threat.

Trouble is much like love: when the time is ready, it will find you.

It turns out she didn’t die with Stephen. She lives. She closes her eyes in silent apology to her husband. I’m still here, darling. Still here, while you are gone. I suspect I should just make the best of it.

There is very little in this world as dangerous as security.

Joanna looked beautiful today. I mean, she always looks beautiful, except for a few years in her mid-twenties when she did something with her hair,

It’s always been a roller coaster with Joanna. To be fair, I suppose it’s often a roller coaster with me too. When it’s your own roller coaster, you don’t notice so much.

When Paul came back in, he could see my tears, and so Joanna and I both pretended I have glaucoma. The next time he came over he brought a leaflet on new glaucoma treatments with him, and talked it through with me so patiently that ever since Joanna and I have had to keep up the lie. I shall have to get a miracle cure one of these days.

Joanna and Paul aren’t going on a honeymoon as such—“People don’t go on honeymoons anymore, Mum,” says Joanna. I would have argued, but it was her wedding day, but really people do still go on honeymoon, I am certain of it. In fact, all around the world there are long queues of people doing things that Joanna tells me nobody does anymore. Having honeymoons, drinking normal milk, watching television. I once told her that more people live the way I do than live the way she does, and she just pointed at my sandwich toaster and said, “I don’t think so.”

When you think about my past few years I’ve really managed a lot of firsts. I solved my first murder, I met Mike Waghorn, I’ve had diamonds in my microwave, and now I have a son-in-law. I even watched a French film recently (Ibrahim). It’s never too late. That said, I didn’t enjoy the film, even when Ibrahim explained why I should, and Mike Waghorn seems to have changed his email address.

“Shall we tidy you up?” Ibrahim suggests. “Jason won’t mind,” says Ron. “I might just pull your trousers up though,” says Ibrahim. “Sorry to be so formal.”

Comatose on a bathroom floor is not the sort of trick you can pull too often. Collapse on a bathroom floor after a wedding and that can be quirky and charming; collapse on a bathroom floor every Friday night, and you’d soon find there’s no one around to cook you breakfast and pull up your trousers.

Kendrick tugs at his hand. “Have you ever been in a war, Grandad?” “Miners’ strike 1974,” says Ron. Kendrick nods. “Why did the miners strike though?” Ron feels his chest fill. “Let me tell you a few things about late-stage capitalism, Kenny.” “Yessss!” says Kendrick.

“When old friends die, you’re furious, because you’ve never quite finished what you were saying to them.”

“I have a question for you, Paul,” says Elizabeth. “If you don’t mind?” “Please,” says Paul. “I’ve never been questioned by an ex-spy before.” “No such thing as an ex-spy,” says Elizabeth.

All the way up to around the year 2000, if you knew what you were doing with a computer, the police couldn’t touch you. But then the computers all started talking to each other, and, before you knew it, your phone started talking to your computer, and your fridge started talking to your phone, and you willingly paid for a device that recorded everything

you said and sent it to a server farm in the middle of the Nevada desert, just because it was easier than switching the radio on by yourself.

“Why don’t dogs wear shoes?” Kendrick asks.

Ron’s flat is now fit to bursting. Just how he likes it.

“Cats don’t wear shoes,” says Kendrick. “The only animals that wear shoes are horses.” Ibrahim leans over to Kendrick. “Though you might say ‘shoo’ to a cat!” “That’s a really terrific joke, Uncle Ibrahim,” says Kendrick.

Tomorrow we’re off to Manchester. I have never been. I’ve seen it on television, of course, but you never get the full picture, do you? I also once had a colleague from Manchester, and she won the pools and marched into an operating theater and told a particularly unpleasant surgeon to go and eff himself, and then invited us all to join her in the pub after work. Again, it might not be the full picture, but it left an impression.

My God, the older we all get, the more like children we are.

“I shook your hand,” says Bill. “And then a copper hit you with a truncheon.” Ron raises his pint. “Happier times.” Bill clinks and agrees.

Ron looks up at the football match on the big screen. Arsenal are playing Man City, and he hopes they both lose.

Lord Townes nods. “How do bankers make their money?” Joyce has often wondered. Ron once told her, but he becomes quite hard to follow the angrier he gets.

“His house is tucked away,” the man says. “I’ll take round an Amazon delivery that needs signing for.” Amazon deliveries have been the single greatest boon for professional hitmen. Everyone is always expecting one.

Since he arrived here, he’s already met a Moroccan counterfeiter and a German guy who sells fake vitamins on the internet. Travel broadens the mind.

The four friends settle back. Ron could stay in here all day. He can see a woman in her eighties—Paula something—doing slow lengths in the pool, and a man in his nineties—Dennis—doing slow widths. Do what you can while you can. Their inevitable collision, when it happens, is very friendly, even flirtatious from Dennis’s end. Again, do what you can while you can.

Tia feels for her gun. If you have to point a gun at someone, you’re not making a proper living. You’re scaring people, and that’s easy. “I will kill you if you don’t give me your money” seems an over-the-top way of making money.

It’s like the people who run this warehouse. If you can’t afford to pay your staff proper wages, you’re cheating. You’re not making an honest living. You’re stealing.

Kendrick wanders through to the kitchen. “Am I allowed orange squash?” “Are you normally allowed orange squash?” Jason asks. “At home, no,” says Kendrick. “Because of the sugar, but at Grandad’s, yes, because sugar never did him any harm.”

“So you can keep being flippant if you want. Or you can sit down and listen and not judge.” Elizabeth nods. “I can sit down and listen, certainly.”

“Up and coming area,” says the estate agent. “Couldn’t give these away a few years ago.” There must be a shop, Joanna thinks, where estate agents buy their suits. “But there’s the overspill now,” says the estate agent. “People priced out of the Peckham Triangle, so they come here. Good buses, was near the primary school till that burned down, there’re trees a couple of streets down.”

The cage reaches the bottom of the shaft with the sort of reassuringly terrifying jolt a modern lift system just wouldn’t be able to replicate.

unconditional love has a huge flaw. If you love me no matter what, who I actually am doesn’t matter. If someone loves your essence, your very being, what can you do to make them love you more or love you less? Nothing: there is no space. So the only option left to you is to continually prod at that unconditional love, to test it and stretch it, to mock it even.

With his steroid-built muscles and cocaine-funded suits, Danny had always looked to Ron like a child’s drawing of a man. He recognizes now that Danny himself was the child who had done the drawing. He had turned himself into someone that would never have to face his own weakness and vulnerability, who ran from all the things that turn real little boys into real men.

When things are noisy, and everyone is asking you to look at something right this instant, we mustn’t forget all the things still going on in quiet corners. There’s the news, and then there’s life.

Acknowledgments How lovely to have Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim and Ron back together again, and in (slightly) happier times. I hope you enjoyed getting reacquainted. I can’t tell you how many different ways I have just attempted to spell the word “reacquainted.” The relief when the spellcheck finally waved it through was palpable. If you ever want to spend a long time writing a short paragraph, just put the words “acknowledgments” and “reacquainted” in it. That will be your morning gone.