The Last Devil to Die (Thursday Murder Club, #4)

by Richard Osman

So I was convenient. Which is the best you can ask for sometimes, isn’t it?

I fear I might be barking up the wrong tree with this one. I just hope I can bark up the right tree one of these days. Before I run out of trees. Or before I stop barking altogether.

What is it about Christmas? Everything that’s wrong seems worse, and everything that’s right seems better.

“May you be granted health and wealth and wisdom, and may you see your beauty reflected in those around you,”

Perhaps next year I’ll get her an advent calendar full of diamonds or hummus.

The day she knew must arrive is here. She has been losing him a paragraph at a time, but the chapter is done. And the book is close to its end.

Had she really understood then that those were the best of times? That she was in heaven? She thinks she did understand, yes. Understood she had been given a great gift.

The real secret was that when they looked at each other, they each thought they had the better deal. But, however much life teaches you that nothing lasts, it is still a shock when it disappears. When the man you love with every fiber starts returning to the stars, an atom at a time.

Wherever he is going, Elizabeth will want him to make a good impression, make people understand how special he is, and how loved he is. I don’t know how they will cope apart. Stephen will enter a new world, of course, but his walls closed in long ago now. Elizabeth loves him so utterly, and is loved by him so utterly, and that is being stolen from her.

They say that time softens the pain, but that’s a fairy tale. Who would ever love again if anyone actually told the truth? I’m afraid there are some days when I could still rip out my own heart and weep myself hollow for Gerry. Some days? Every day. That’s the journey my best friend has just begun. So forgive me if, for just a while longer, I choose to imagine that Elizabeth is going to the Palace to see the King.

“I don’t know why we’re on this earth,” says Stephen. “Truly I don’t. But if I wanted to find the answer, I would begin with how much I love you. The answer will be in there somewhere, I’m sure.

Donna sat in the row behind and, every now and again, she would reach out and squeeze his shoulder. Just letting him know she was there. I did the same for Elizabeth, but no one was there to do it for me.

Days of death are days when we weigh our relationship with love in our bare hands.

He was so strong and so vulnerable, and I became myself, which I hadn’t thought possible. And I talk a lot of nonsense about love sometimes, Bob, but we were in love.

The daffodils are out very early this year. I’ve seen the daffodils bloom for nearly eighty years now, and they are still a miracle to me. To still be here, to see the flowers that so many other people won’t see. Every year, poking their heads up to see who’s still around to enjoy the show.