Sparkling Cyanide

Sparkling Cyanide
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A beautiful heiress is fatally poisoned in a West End restaurant…Six people sit down to dinner at a table laid for seven. In front of the empty place is a sprig of rosemary – in solemn memory of Rosemary Barton who died at the same table exactly one year previously.No one present on that fateful night would ever forget the woman’s face, contorted beyond recognition – or what they remembered about her astonishing life.

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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Collins, The Crime Club 1945

Sparkling Cyanide™ is a trade mark of Agatha Christie Limited and Agatha Christie and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trade marks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere.

Copyright © 1945 Agatha Christie Limited. All rights reserved.

www.agathachristie.com

Cover by juliejenkinsdesign.com © HarperCollins/Agatha Christie Ltd 2017

Agatha Christie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008196332

Ebook Edition © February 2017 ISBN: 9780007422821

Version: 2017-04-13

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

BOOK I: Rosemary

Chapter 1: Iris Marle

Chapter 2: Ruth Lessing

Chapter 3: Anthony Browne

Chapter 5: Alexandra Farraday

Chapter 6: George Barton

BOOK II: All Souls’ Day

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

BOOK III: Iris

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Also by Agatha Christie

About the Publisher

‘What can I do to drive away remembrance from mine eyes?’

Six people were thinking of Rosemary Barton who had died nearly a year ago …

Iris Marle was thinking about her sister, Rosemary.

For nearly a year she had deliberately tried to put the thought of Rosemary away from her. She hadn’t wanted to remember.

It was too painful—too horrible!

The blue cyanosed face, the convulsed clutching fingers …

The contrast between that and the gay lovely Rosemary of the day before … Well, perhaps not exactly gay. She had had ’flu—she had been depressed, run down … All that had been brought out at the inquest. Iris herself had laid stress on it. It accounted, didn’t it, for Rosemary’s suicide?

Once the inquest was over, Iris had deliberately tried to put the whole thing out of her mind. Of what good was remembrance? Forget it all! Forget the whole horrible business.

But now, she realized, she had got to remember. She had got to think back into the past … To remember carefully every slight unimportant seeming incident …

That extraordinary interview with George last night necessitated remembrance.

It had been so unexpected, so frightening. Wait—had it been so unexpected? Hadn’t there been indications beforehand? George’s growing absorption, his absent-mindedness, his unaccountable actions—his—well, queerness was the only word for it! All leading up to that moment last night when he had called her into the study and taken the letters from the drawer of the desk.

So now there was no help for it. She had got to think about Rosemary—to remember.

Rosemary—her sister …

With a shock Iris realized suddenly that it was the first time in her life she had ever thought about Rosemary. Thought about her, that is, objectively, as a person.

She had always accepted Rosemary without thinking about her. You didn’t think about your mother or your father or your sister or your aunt. They just existed, unquestioned, in those relationships.

You didn’t think about them as people. You didn’t ask yourself, even, what they were like.

What had Rosemary been like?

That might be very important now. A lot might depend upon it. Iris cast her mind back into the past. Herself and Rosemary as children …

Rosemary had been the elder by six years.

Glimpses of the past came back—brief flashes—short scenes. Herself as a small child eating bread and milk, and Rosemary, important in pig tails, ‘doing lessons’ at a table.

The seaside one summer—Iris envying Rosemary who was a ‘big girl’ and could swim!

Rosemary going to boarding school—coming home for the holidays. Then she herself at school, and Rosemary being ‘finished’ in Paris. Schoolgirl Rosemary; clumsy, all arms and legs. ‘Finished’ Rosemary coming back from Paris with a strange new frightening elegance, soft voiced, graceful, with a swaying undulating figure, with red gold chestnut hair and big black fringed dark blue eyes. A disturbing beautiful creature—grown up—in a different world!



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