“Mrs Palfrey first came to the Claremont Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in January. Rain had closed in over London, and her taxi sloshed along the almost deserted Cromwell Road, past one cavernous porch after another, the driver going slowly and poking his head out into the wet, for the hotel was no...
My father had said goodbye to me two days earlier at the Gara de Nord in Bucharest. On that memorable afternoon, I was welcomed to France by my distant cousin Eduard, whom I had last seen when I was a timid and secretive eleven-year-old. He greeted me in Romanian, embraced me, and remarked on the...
He had performed his duty with considerate expertise. — Do not move, Mr Chapman. I am trying not to cut you. And now Veronica was washing him, preparing his body for the ongoing slaughter or investigation or whatever Dr Pereira cared to call it. — There, there, she murmured, as if to a fearful ch...
I also decided that I needed a teacher. I already knew a few basic words and had followed a course on two cassettes, but now I needed to be guided through the language’s tortuous grammar. I phoned an acquaintance at the Romanian Embassy, asking for help. There was a student at the School of Slavo...