Sparkling Cyanide Read online

  Contents

  About Agatha Christie

  The Agatha Christie Collection

  E-book Extras

  Book 1

  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 2

  All Souls’ Day

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Book 3

  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

  Copyright

  www.agathachristie.com

  About the Publisher

  About Agatha Christie

  Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

  Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.

  In 1926, now averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the first of her books to be published by William Collins and marked the beginning of an author-publisher relationship that lasted for fifty years and produced over seventy books. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was also the first of Agatha Christie’s works to be dramatised—as Alibi—and to have a successful run in London’s West End. The Mousetrap, her most famous play, opened in 1952 and runs to this day at St Martin’s Theatre in the West End; it is the longest-running play in history.

  Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since when a number of her books have been published: the bestselling novel Sleeping Murder appeared in 1976, followed by An Autobiography and the short story collections Miss Marple’s Final Cases; Problem at Pollensa Bay; and While the Light Lasts. In 1998, Black Coffee was the first of her plays to be novelised by Charles Osborne, Mrs Christie’s biographer.

  The Agatha Christie Collection

  Christie Crime Classics

  The Man in the Brown Suit

  The Secret of Chimneys

  The Seven Dials Mystery

  The Mysterious Mr Quin

  The Sittaford Mystery

  The Hound of Death

  The Listerdale Mystery

  Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?

  Parker Pyne Investigates

  Murder Is Easy

  And Then There Were None

  Towards Zero

  Death Comes as the End

  Sparkling Cyanide

  Crooked House

  They Came to Baghdad

  Destination Unknown

  Spider’s Web *

  The Unexpected Guest *

  Ordeal by Innocence

  The Pale Horse

  Endless Night

  Passenger To Frankfurt

  Problem at Pollensa Bay

  While the Light Lasts

  Hercule Poirot Investigates

  The Mysterious Affair at Styles

  The Murder on the Links

  Poirot Investigates

  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

  The Big Four

  The Mystery of the Blue Train

  Black Coffee *

  Peril at End House

  Lord Edgware Dies

  Murder on the Orient Express

  Three-Act Tragedy

  Death in the Clouds

  The ABC Murders

  Murder in Mesopotamia

  Cards on the Table

  Murder in the Mews

  Dumb Witness

  Death on the Nile

  Appointment with Death

  Hercule Poirot’s Christmas

  Sad Cypress

  One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

  Evil Under the Sun

  Five Little Pigs

  The Hollow

  The Labours of Hercules

  Taken at the Flood

  Mrs McGinty’s Dead

  After the Funeral

  Hickory Dickory Dock

  Dead Man’s Folly

  Cat Among the Pigeons

  The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

  The Clocks

  Third Girl

  Hallowe’en Party

  Elephants Can Remember

  Poirot’s Early Cases

  Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

  Miss Marple Mysteries

  The Murder at the Vicarage

  The Thirteen Problems

  The Body in the Library

  The Moving Finger

  A Murder Is Announced

  They Do It with Mirrors

  A Pocket Full of Rye

  4.50 from Paddington

  The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side

  A Caribbean Mystery

  At Bertram’s Hotel

  Nemesis

  Sleeping Murder

  Miss Marple’s Final Cases

  Tommy & Tuppence

  The Secret Adversary

  Partners in Crime

  N or M?

  By the Pricking of My Thumbs

  Postern of Fate

  Published as Mary Westmacott

  Giant’s Bread

  Unfinished Portrait

  Absent in the Spring

  The Rose and the Yew Tree

  A Daughter’s a Daughter

  The Burden

  Memoirs

  An Autobiography

  Come, Tell Me How You Live

  Play Collections

  The Mousetrap and Selected Plays

  Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays

  * novelised by Charles Osborne

  E-Book Extras

  Essay by Charles Osborne

  Charles Osborne on Sparkling Cyanide

  Sparkling Cyanide…is one of those novels in which a crime is investigated some time after it has been perpetrated: in this case, on its first anniversary…

  The murder of Rosemary Barton, for such it proves to have been, is not the only crime to come under investigation in Sparkling Cyanide, for her widower’s plans go sadly awry and his anniversary party ends with another death. Someone who was invited on both occasions but who failed to put in an appearance at either was Colonel Race. Race, the one-time Secret Service agent who was first encountered in The Man in the Brown Suit in 1924, is now over sixty. In Sparkling Cyanide he helps another investigator to discover the murderer; this will prove to be the last of Colonel Race’s appearances in the works of Agatha christie.

  The reconstruction of a fatal dinner party and the methods by which one of the murders is committed had already been used by Mrs Christie in ‘Yellow Iris’, a Poirot short story�
��In Sparkling Cyanide the second murder involves a mistake made jointly by a group of people which strains the reader’s credulity rather dangerously. Up to that point, however, the story has been told with a compulsive ease and a conviction which place the novel among the author’s most successful. It is, however, difficult to believe that, after dancing, people would return to the wrong places at their table simply because a purse had inadvertently been moved one place to the left.

  Especially impressive, though noticeable only if you take the trouble to re-read the passage after having finished the novel, is Mrs christie’s skating on extremely thin ice, in the second chapter where she quite blatantly reveals the solution but reveals so much else as well that you fail to notice what is being offered. As the sly author said to an interviewer many years later, ‘I don’t cheat, you know. I just say things that might be taken two ways’.25

  It was with Five Little Pigs, two years earlier, that an Agatha Christie novel had first achieved sales of 20,000. Now, with Sparkling Cyanide, sales in the first year of publication reached 30,000. From this point on, every Christie title would become, to use publishers’ jargon, a ‘bestseller’.

  Warner Brothers produced a TV movie version of Sparkling Cyanide in 1983, with Anthony Andrews, Deborah Raffin, and Nancy Marchand in key roles.

  About Charles Osborne

  This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.

  Book 1

  Rosemary

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

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

  Chapter 1

  Iris Marle

  I

  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 absentmindedness, 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.

  II

  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!

  From then on they had seen very little of each other, the six-year gap had been at its widest.

  Iris had been still at school, Rosemary in the full swing of a ‘season.’ Even when Iris came home, the gap remained. Rosemary’s life was one of late mornings in bed, fork luncheons with other débutantes, dances most evenings of the week. Iris had been in the schoolroom with Mademoiselle, had gone for walks in the Park, had had supper at nine o’clock and gone to bed at ten. The intercourse between the sisters had been limited to such brief interchanges as:

  ‘Hullo, Iris, telephone for a taxi for me, there’s a lamb, I’m going to be devastatingly late,’ or

  ‘I don’t like that new frock, Rosemary. It doesn’t suit you. It’s all bunch and fuss.’

  Then had come Rosemary’s engagement to George Barton. Excitement, shopping, streams of parcels, bridesmaids’ dresses.

  The wedding. Walking up the aisles behind Rosemary, hearing whispers:

  ‘What a beautiful bride she makes…’

  Why had Rosemary married George? Even at the time Iris had been vaguely surprised. There had been so many exciting young men, ringing Rosemary up, taking her out. Why choose George Barton, fifteen years older than herself, kindly, pleasant, but definitely dull?

  George was well off, but it wasn’t money. Rosemary had her own money, a great deal of it.

  Uncle Paul’s money…

  Iris searched her mind carefully, seeking to differentiate between what she knew now and what she had known then: Uncle Paul, for instance?

  He wasn’t really an uncle, she had always known that. Without ever having been definitely told them she knew certain facts. Paul Bennett had been in love with their mother. She had preferred another and a poorer man. Paul Bennett had taken his defeat in a romantic spirit. He had remained the family friend, adopted an attitude of romantic platonic devotion. He had become Uncle Paul, had stood godfather to the first-born child, Rosemary. When he died, it was found that he had left his entire fortune to his little god-daughter, then a child of thirteen.

  Rosemary, besides her beauty, had been an heiress. And she had married nice dull George Barton.

  Why? Iris had wondered then. She wondered now. Iris didn’t believe that Rosemary had ever been in love with him. But she had seemed very happy with him and she had been fond of him—yes, definitely fond of him. Iris had good opportunities for knowing, for a year after the marriage, their mother, lovely delicate Viola Marle, had died, and Iris, a girl of seventeen, had gone to live with Rosemary Barton and her husband.

  A girl of seventeen. Iris pondered over the picture of herself. What had she been like? What had she felt, thought, seen?

  She came to the conclusion that that young Iris Marle had been slow of development—unthinking, acquiescing in things as they were. Had she resented, for instance, her mother’s earlier absorpti
on in Rosemary? On the whole she thought not. She had accepted, unhesitatingly, the fact that Rosemary was the important one. Rosemary was ‘out’—naturally her mother was occupied as far as her health permitted with her elder daughter. That had been natural enough. Her own turn would come some day. Viola Marle had always been a somewhat remote mother, preoccupied mainly with her own health, relegating her children to nurses, governesses, schools, but invariably charming to them in those brief moments when she came across them. Hector Marle had died when Iris was five years old. The knowledge that he drank more than was good for him had permeated so subtly that she had not the least idea how it had actually come to her.

  Seventeen-year-old Iris Marle had accepted life as it came, had duly mourned for her mother, had worn black clothes, had gone to live with her sister and her sister’s husband at their house in Elvaston Square.

  Sometimes it had been rather dull in that house. Iris wasn’t to come out, officially, until the following year. In the meantime she took French and German lessons three times a week, and also attended domestic science classes. There were times when she had nothing much to do and nobody to talk to. George was kind, invariably affectionate and brotherly. His attitude had never varied. He was the same now.

  And Rosemary? Iris had seen very little of Rosemary. Rosemary had been out a good deal. Dressmakers, cocktail parties, bridge…

  What did she really know about Rosemary when she came to think of it? Of her tastes, of her hopes, of her fears? Frightening, really, how little you might know of a person after living in the same house with them! There had been little or no intimacy between the sisters.

  But she’d got to think now. She’d got to remember. It might be important.

  Certainly Rosemary had seemed happy enough…

  III

  Until that day—a week before it happened.

  She, Iris, would never forget that day. It stood out crystal clear—each detail, each word. The shining mahogany table, the pushed back chair, the hurried characteristic writing…

  Iris closed her eyes and let the scene come back…