Hendon Magistrates’ Court was not the most salubrious place to be spending a morning, especially if you’d had to fly all the way from New York for the privilege, Ruby thought miserably. She watched Luke Devlin arrive in the crowded ante-chamber flanked by an elegantly dressed older man wearing a gown but no wig, a younger man in a pin-striped suit busy talking on his mobile and a woman in ice-pick heels, her arms laden with file folders.
‘Looks like he’s brought the cavalry with him. Surprised he bothered to come all the way from Manhattan,’ Jacie whispered in her ear.
So was Ruby, really. She’d assumed when she’d last seen Luke Devlin getting into a taxi on Kensington High Street, after they’d been booked at the Hyde Park police station by a particularly eager young officer of The Royal Parks Police, that she was never going to see him again.
All things considered, he’d taken the arrest surprisingly well. Or she’d assumed he had, because he’d barely spoken once the officer had apprehended them.
Devlin’s gaze landed on her from across the room and he gave a terse nod of greeting. Then he ignored her, as he listened to the man in the robes, who had to be a barrister.
‘Perhaps we should have bought a legal team, too?’ Jacie said. ‘I thought this was just a formality.’
‘What legal team?’ Ruby murmured. ‘We don’t have one and we can’t afford to get one. And it is a formality, as I’m pleading guilty and falling on the mercy of the court.’
‘You can’t go to prison can you?’ Jacie hissed.
‘No, it’s only a misdemeanour.’ Or at least she had assumed as much, not really understanding any of the charges listed on the paperwork the police officer had given her over three weeks ago. How was singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ disturbing the peace? Maybe she’d been a little off-key – but it was hard to remain on pitch when your heart was shattering into a billion pieces.
Perhaps she should have checked what permits were needed to scatter ashes, and waited to do it in the daylight. But that’s not what Matty’s will had asked her to do. And she refused to feel bad about carrying out Matty’s wishes. She didn’t even feel bad about the inappropriate shivers which had sprinted up her spine when Luke’s deep voice had joined hers, or that his hands had closed over her bum when she landed on top of him after taking a header off the gate.
Although she did feel bad about delaying Luke’s departure and then dragging him back to London and into court three weeks later. Any hope she’d had of persuading Devlin to invest in The Royale to help cover their debts was surely deeper in the duck poo than Matty’s ashes now.
When the clerk finally read out their names – a whole hour later – the inappropriate shivers had turned to guilty recriminations.
She really hoped she couldn’t be sent to jail for singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ off-key in a Royal Park. She had their gala screening of About a Boy – the next film in Matty’s Classics season – to host this weekend. And they had all been working their bums off over the last three weeks to get The Royale into profit again. She and Jacie had gone over the accounts each evening, trying to find savings that didn’t involve cutting any staff jobs and they’d discovered quite a few. But there was still more to do. She did not have time to do time.
She filed into the court beside Jacie. But Luke didn’t meet her gaze this time, and her heart plunged even further into her chest cavity.
He probably hates you now.
The overly bright fluorescent lighting and an abundance of blond wood in the décor made the courtroom look like a cross between an IKEA showroom and a Dickens novel, but nowhere near as intimidating as In the Name of the Father, which Ruby had been braced for. The three average-looking people – two men, one woman – who sat behind the high bench at the front of the court weren’t even wearing gowns or wigs.
Ruby was actually a tad disappointed. She’d been hoping for an experience to at least make this calamity worthy of a decent anecdote. But the setting and the participants – apart from her fellow defendant – looked decidedly ordinary.
She scanned the faces of the three magistrates as the usher led her past the long table where the prosecutor and the defence solicitor sat. But as she stepped into the box, her gaze snagged on the rotund elderly man in the middle of the bench.
It took a moment, but as the court proceedings began, and the clerk read out the charges, recognition finally struck.
Benjy?
Could it possibly be him? She’d only exchanged a few pleasantries with the man, and he looked much more austere in the dark blue three-piece suit, but she was positive he was one of Matty’s friends and a semi-regular at the Pensioners’ Club matinees each Wednesday run by Beryl.
A small smile lifted his hangdog face as he obviously recognized her too, but then he coughed into his hand and the smile dropped as he launched into his opening spiel.
Clearing his throat, he shuffled the papers on the bench in front of him. ‘Minor criminal damage and trespass, is it? I see you’ve pled guilty to the charge, Ms Graham. Is that correct?’
‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘I didn’t want to waste any more of everyone’s time. I am sincerely sorry.’
‘Can I ask what you were doing in the park after dark, Ms Graham?’
She nodded, feeling marginally less like Oliver Twist thanks to his avuncular Mr Micawber tone. ‘I …’ She glanced over her shoulder to find Luke sitting at the back of the room with his legal team, waiting for his turn. ‘We. Myself and Mr Devlin were scattering Matty’s – I mean Matthew Devlin’s – ashes …’ The friendly neighbourhood asteroid that had been jammed in her throat ever since Matty’s death scrapped over her throat. ‘As per his wishes. I persuaded Luke to come with me. It was all my fault, I’m willing to accept full responsibility for the—’
‘Thank you, Ms Graham.’ Judge Benjy said, lifting his hand and she faded into silence. ‘I’ll confer with my colleagues now to pass sentence,’ he added.
After a short deliberation with the other two magistrates on the bench, Judge Benjy delivered his verdict in the same warm tone she remembered from Matty’s wake, when he’d been telling a story about the time Matty had toppled backwards off The Royale’s float at Notting Hill Carnival because he’d sewn way too many diamantes into his fairy wings.
‘Given the extraneous circumstances. We think a sixty-pound fine is sufficient. You have sixty days to pay, Ms Grahame – if you have significant problems paying you can make arrangements with the courtroom clerk.’ The gavel came down on the bench, making Ruby jump.
‘Would Mr Devlin like to step into the dock?’
She was led out of the dock.
Oh, thank you, Judge Benjy.
Sixty pounds was doable. All she had to do was raid her LA trip fund and forego her bi-weekly treat of a spiced caramel latte from the local coffee shop for the foreseeable future.
She took a seat in the viewing gallery at the back of the court, assuming Luke would get a similar treatment. Like her, he entered a guilty plea via the barrister in his legal team. He was only here for a sentencing hearing, too. A sixty-pound fine would be nothing to him.
Should she offer to pay it, though? On a matter of principle? After all, he’d been there helping her. And somehow, much to her astonishment, he had made the whole experience better.
He had literally caught her when she fell off the gate. And his deep voice had added resonance and comfort to the chorus of ‘Over the Rainbow’. Her throat began to ache again. Plus, she needed to keep him as sweet as possible if she was going to have any hope at all of saving The Royale.
But as the case progressed it appeared neither Judge Benjy – nor Luke – had read the script.
‘I see Mr Devlin that your solicitor has already made two requests that you be excused from today’s sentencing hearing?’
‘Your Honour, Mr Devlin runs a multi-national construction company and lives and works in Manhattan. He has had to fly here especially for this hearing. He was only in London to attend the funeral of Mr Matthew Devlin and the reading of the will. His business responsibilities have already been severely—’
Judge Benjy held up his hand to silence the barrister. ‘So we understand. But he has pled guilty to the charge, has he not?’
‘Yes, Your Honour.’ The barrister stepped in again.
‘Did you know your uncle, Mr Devlin?’ Judge Benjy asked.
Ruby did not have a good feeling about the magistrate’s tone.
Luke’s solicitor and his barrister conferred with each other, probably not liking it, either.
‘Mr Devlin, perhaps you would like to answer the question?’ Judge Benjy said.
‘No, Your Honour, I did not know my uncle,’ Luke replied. ‘Although I don’t see how that’s relevant,’ he added. ‘Or how it’s any of the court’s business.’ The insolent tone had Judge Benjy’s brows lifting.
‘Well, now, I’ll tell you how it’s relevant,’ said Judge Benjy, all traces of Mr Micawber well and truly gone. ‘If you did not know Matty Devlin, why precisely were you breaking into The Serpentine Lido to pollute the lake with his ashes?’
Because Matty asked him to. And so did I.
The answer reverberated in Ruby’s head. But instead of giving himself a get-out clause, Luke shrugged. ‘It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’
‘I understand you have inherited half of The Royale Cinema in West London but are considering selling your stake in it?’
Ruby’s throat closed. Who had told Benjy that?
But instead of defending himself, again Luke seemed keen to dig himself in even deeper. ‘That would be correct, because I’m sure as hell not planning to inherit its debts.’
Judge Benjy liked that answer even less, his cheeks reddening and his eyes narrowing to slits. ‘I see.’
He bent his head to have a whispered discussion with his colleagues on the bench. After an endless five minutes, he cast his gaze directly at Luke. ‘Given your vast wealth, Mr Devlin, and your somewhat cavalier approach to the laws of trespass in our Royal Parks and the legacy of the community institution you have inherited, I feel that a fine will not suffice on this occasion.’
‘But, Your Honour, Mr Devlin has entered a guilty plea and is not on trial for—’ The barrister tried to intervene but Benjy, the hanging judge, was having none of it.
‘Mr Grayling, please sit down. You can dispute the sentence at a later date, and certainly not before it has actually been bestowed,’ Benjy said, clearly enjoying his role as a hokey arbiter of justice who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Steven Spielberg movie.
The barrister sat down.
‘Mr Devlin, I sentence you to three hundred hours of community payback at The Royale Cinema on Talbot Road, North Kensington. Given your construction skills and the cinema’s lengthy list of on-going repairs, I’m sure you can find a way to make yourself useful.’
The barrister jumped back up. ‘But, Your Honour, that’s outrageous. Mr Devlin has a business to run in Manhattan, this punishment far outstrips the offence for which—’
‘Mis-ter Grayling, sentence has been passed. If you wish to appeal it, you can do so.’ Judge Benjy’s gaze slid back to Luke, who was showing no emotion whatsoever that Ruby could see. Although his shoulders looked rather tight.
He had to be furious. But he could have been a lot more accommodating and a little less arrogant.
That said, why had Judge Benjy gifted them with Luke’s community payback? They weren’t a public institution.
They did do some gratis outreach work for the local council by running non-profit screenings for schools in the area and the senior citizens – but they’d never had a community payback order made on their premises before.
‘Mr Devlin half-owns the cinema, Mr Grayling,’ Benjy added, going the full Judge Dredd now – all pomp and circumstance and taking no prisoners. ‘I can’t imagine why he’d object to basically working for himself to improve facilities that have been enjoyed for decades by our local community.’
Grayling opened his mouth, but Benjy slammed his gavel down. ‘This sentencing hearing is closed.’
Ruby stood, shocked by the verdict.
Should she go to Luke, and apologise for the arrest … again?
Her gaze connected with Luke’s as he stepped down from the dock. The barrister and solicitor surrounded him, talking at him in furious whispers, but that pure blue gaze remained fixed on her.
The tense expression on his face wasn’t hard to read.
He was furious, but when he broke eye contact to walk out of the courtroom with his legal team, she had the strangest feeling it wasn’t her he was furious with.
***
Terrific, you’ve just managed to turn a cluster fuck into a cluster fuck-tastrophe.
‘Mr Devlin, I assure you this sentence will not stand. We can appeal it. The magistrate clearly had prior knowledge of your situation, which suggests a conflict of interest, and we can—’
‘It’s okay, Grayling,’ Luke interrupted the stream of outraged legalese that was costing him five hundred pounds an hour. That had been his first mistake. Hiring a Queen’s Counsel to argue a misdemeanour case in Civil Court. And then letting his jet-lag and his extreme irritation – from that weird jolt of awareness at seeing Ruby Graham again – get the better of him. He probably deserved the damn slap. He had behaved like an arrogant asshole. The magistrate had spotted it, even if no one else had.
Or rather his fifth mistake, he corrected as he watched Ruby and her selfie-snapping friend from The Wizard of Oz night, disappear down the corridor towards the clerk’s office. Ruby was dressed in another of those shorty dresses with the biker boots she’d been wearing three weeks ago in the Park. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his suit pants, the memory of inadvertently grabbing her ass as she dropped into his arms way too vivid, the weird jolt of awareness coming back for an even weirder encore.
No, his first mistake had been to follow Ruby to the park thinking he could fix her grief when he didn’t even know her.
His second had been to engage in a conversation with her about a man who meant nothing to him and meant so much to her.
His third had been to help her scale the gate, discovering exactly how glorious her ass was in the process.
And his fourth and final mistake had been to indulge in a halting chorus of a cheesy eighty-year-old show tune while Ruby stood beside him, scattering her best friend’s ashes, the tears she was unwilling to shed causing her to tremble over every single note.
1Because now he felt invested. And responsible. In a way he hadn’t felt since he was a kid and he’d walked into the en-suite bathroom in his old man’s townhouse in Montecito and found—
‘I’m going to do it,’ he said to Grayling and Janet Abernathy, the solicitor, blanking the picture in his head which was only going to turn this cluster fuck-tastrophe into a cluster fuck-mageddon. ‘The sentence … I’m going to do it,’ he added, because both Grayling and Abernathy were momentarily dumbstruck.
‘You really don’t need to do that, Mr Devlin,’ Janet Abernathy pitched in first. ‘It’s a fairly simple process to get it overturned. All we need do is show that your business interests will suffer if you’re forced to stay in London for any length of time. And a magistrate’s court simply does not have the jurisdiction to compel a US citizen to—’
‘I have both US and British citizenship,’ he said. ‘And I can rearrange my schedule.’ Gwen was going to love him when he gave her the good news. He’d have to give her an even bigger bonus this December. ‘To make sure my business interests don’t suffer, there’s always the Internet, and I can fly home on weekends, right?’
‘Well, yes,’ Janet murmured. ‘Community payback orders only apply outside the hours of work if the subject is employed.’ Her gaze intensified. ‘In fact we could negotiate a lengthy time frame to complete it, so you would only have to return for a weekend every couple of months. Or perhaps we could offer a donation in lieu of your time on—’
‘Nope, I don’t want to do that,’ he added, surprised to realise it was the truth.
Throwing his money around had already made him look like enough of a dick and he wanted to get this over with – stringing it out for months would only increase his contact with Ruby of the Lush Ass and Sad Eyes and that probably wasn’t a good idea. Plus, the theatre had less than three months left in business now, if his financial calculations were correct. ‘I’d rather just do the time.’
It’s what he’d always done to make cluster fucks go away: bury his head in work – the harder and sweatier and more time-consuming the better. This would be the first time he’d be doing that to fix a cluster fuck of his own making, so at least it had novelty value. Plus, it was years since he’d had to get his hands dirty on a job. And even longer since he’d strapped on a tool belt. From the snapshot he’d got of The Royale while he was being mobbed by the Falcone for Pope brigade, it needed a lot of work. The cornices were crumbling, the carpets were wrecked, the paintwork looked as if it had been done by a five-year-old and the light fixtures, even in the lobby area, hailed back to the days when Judy herself had been a bright young thing and drug addiction, burn-out and an untimely death had all still been years ahead of her.
He was a code certified electrician, knew enough about plumbing and roofing to fix any major problems, and had more than enough experience as a painter, decorator and carpenter to handle anything the old building had to throw at him. And while he’d never met his Uncle Matty, after singing a few off-key choruses of the guy’s favourite show tune, in a weird way he felt like he owed him. Something. Working on his uncle’s movie theatre ought to get that out of his system before they had to sell the place.
Plus, he had once loved getting his hands dirty.
And he’d missed it. Luckily, he had no major projects launching globally at the moment. And when was the last time he’d taken any vacation time? A genuine break? Not only that, but the greatest plus of all, he’d be an ocean away from the biggest drama queen in the Western World for four whole mental-health-cleansing weeks while she was rocking her grief-stricken dying swan act over the untimely demise of the brother she hadn’t spoken to in thirty years.
Cowardly yes, but what choice did he have? He’d gotten into this fix by helping out Ruby Graham, so now he was going to have to help out Ruby and her movie theatre to get out of it again. There was a certain freaky kind of logic to that, too. And he loved logic. And heck, if he did the work he’d be increasing the property’s potential profit when they had to sell the place.
When you looked at the sentence that way, it was almost a win-win.
He tensed at the memory of holding Ruby Graham’s warm weight in his arms, her fresh spicy scent filling his nostrils and the weird jolt of awareness that had freaked him out a moment ago, then released a careful breath.
This decision had nothing to do with Ruby, or her toned thighs, or her full, firm breasts, or her sweet sensual voice catching on the words of that dumb song. This was about owning his own shit after a couple of dumb decisions, bad mouthing a judge for no good reason, paying a debt to his Uncle Matty and getting the heck out of his mom’s orbit.
He didn’t owe Ruby a thing – especially not after getting himself arrested and slapped with a community service order on her behalf – and the weird jolt would go away as soon as he got stuck working in her theatre.
He tugged his iPhone out of his pocket after bidding goodbye to Grayling and Abernathy, who still looked shell-shocked.
Join the club, guys.
‘Hey, Gwen,’ he said when his ultra-efficient administrative assistant picked up on the first buzz. ‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’
‘Hit me with the good first,’ she said in a suspicious growl, because Gwen Calhoun was nobody’s fool.
‘You’re not going to be seeing much of me in the next four to six weeks.’
‘Damn, that actually is good news!’ she said, because Gwen – who had been with Devlin Properties ever since the days when their office was a trailer on a construction site in Queens – had never learned how to respect her boss. ‘What’s the bad news?’
‘You get to overhaul my schedule for the next month and locate me an apartment within walking distance of the Talbot Road in West London.’
‘London as in England?’ Gwen asked, the suspicion back with a vengeance.
‘Correct. I just got ordered by a judge here to do three hundred hours community payback. AKA court-ordered community service.’
‘In England? You have got to be kidding me?’ Gwen said, because she did not mince her words either. ‘How the hell did you manage that, Dev? You a badass in disguise?’
‘Apparently. Go figure, huh?’
Gwen’s deep forty-a-day chuckle rasped down the phone line.
Well hell, good to know someone is being entertained.