Sparkling Cyanide
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
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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.
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.
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Source ISBN: 9780008196332
Ebook Edition © February 2017 ISBN: 9780007422821
Version: 2017-04-13
Contents
Copyright
BOOK I: Rosemary
Chapter 1: Iris Marle
Chapter 2: Ruth Lessing
Chapter 3: Anthony Browne
Chapter 4: Stephen Farraday
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!
