The Curious Incident at Claridge's by R.T. Raichev Read Free Book Online Page A

wardrobes this season. We may even see the retro trends of the 1930s and 1940s. Buttoned skirts and exaggerated silhouettes will make a comeback. Minimal to smaller prints will be in vogue and a lot of geometry. Yellow gold and diamonds will continue to dominate … Long hair with cascading waves and soft curls … The Veronica Lake look …
    Bettina stubbed out the cigarette. She couldn’t concentrate. That morning, at some unearthly hour, an anonymous voice on the phone had told her she was no longer a person, she was a concept , which, unless she’d dreamt it, had been rather flattering. (Her reading Bernard-Henri Lévy might have had something to do with it.) Then Penelope had rung to say Mowbray had pitched herself from the top of their house and the police were coming. Bettina had been in a meeting, so she hadn’t been able to ask any questions. Penelope had sounded extremely upset. The poor sweet girl. What she had had to put up with! Being married to Seymour must be the ultimate nightmare. It was a good thing Penelope had—distractions. The idea of a cuckolded Seymour cheered Bettina up. She had tried to ring Penelope later on, but there had been no answer. Perhaps Penelope was with somebody …
    She yawned and, as she did so, happened to glance back at the computer screen. She saw Seymour’s face staring back at her, the mouth extended prodigiously in an agonized scream. Seymour appeared in great pain.
    Bettina leant back in her chair and sat very still. People who didn’t understand that sort of thing would have blamed her imagination—they might even say she was slightly mad. Some fools, she felt sure, might even have argued that it was her own face she had seen—wasn’t a yawn very much like a silent sort of scream?
    Well, her brother’s toucan beak of a nose was very much like hers and they had generally similar casts of features. Not so surprising given that they were fraternal twins. And as it often happened with twins, there existed between them a powerful psychic link, which, since it always made her shiver first, Bettina had come to call the ‘chill’. Only Bettina took the chill seriously. Her brother did seem aware of something , but he tended to attribute it dismissively to indigestion. She could have done without the psychic link—life was complicated enough as it was—but there was nothing she could do about it.
    Their faces were far from prepossessing, though Bettina had always managed to render her ugliness as strikingly picturesque as possible. She pinched the bags under her eyes, pulled a droll grimace, then tugged at her right cheek. She might have plastic surgery when she turned seventy, which was in November. Plastic surgery would destroy the likeness once and for all. It would also, she hoped, make her appear twenty years younger.
    Twenty-five to one. Bettina shivered. She invariably felt the chill each time something bad befell her brother—it had happened not so long ago, on the afternoon he had been rushed to hospital with his foot infection. The initial prognosis had been bad. Her brother’s condition had been described as ‘serious’. She had really hoped and prayed then he might die of blood poisoning.
    She clutched at her bosom. She gasped. The chill had cut through her, worse than ever before! Seymour, she felt sure, was either gravely ill, was breathing his last, or indeed was already dead.
    â€˜Arise, Sir Nicholas,’ said the blonde girl and she laid her hairbrush with great gravity upon his left shoulder.
    â€˜It is “Sir Tradescant”, actually,’ the dark girl corrected her. She put her arm around Nicholas Tradescant’s neck.
    â€˜It’s Sir Nicholas!’
    â€˜No, it’s Sir Tradescant!’ The dark girl kissed him. ‘Isn’t that right, Nicky?’
    â€˜Wait a sec. Don’t tell her, Nicky. Listen to this. Let Nicky marry whoever’s got it right