Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Chapter 26

The book. The blood. The body.

Wyatt’s room was carnage. The mattress of the bottom bunk was flipped out of place, the sheets ragged, the pillow knocked to the floor. A bloodied handprint was smeared on the bathroom door. On the table under the window lay a fist-thick stack of paper. Underneath, between the table and the bathroom door, sat Wyatt Lloyd.

Wyatt was propped between the corner of the wall and the bathroom, his head slumped. Blood had flowed from his neck down his shirtfront, forming a morbid red napkin, and pooled on the floor between his legs. He was wearing blue satin boxer shorts and a formerly plain white T-shirt: it seemed he’d been in bed before he was attacked. More so than the gore and the death, the fact that he was in his pajamas seemed the most undignified. A blood-soaked piece of fabric was wrapped around one hand: Simone’s blue scarf.

The cause of the blood was sticking out of his neck: the stem of a Gemini Publishing pen. I remembered Royce waving his at me, the razor-sharp tip. It was easy to picture it plunging into the soft flesh of Wyatt’s neck, him flailing, hand against the bathroom door, grabbing at the nearest piece of cloth to try to stop the flow.

We squeezed around the door frame, none of us willing to step into the room. It was a jostle of heads to get a good look, as we overcrowded the thin corridor. Royce was at the back of the pack, hopping to get a view; he seemed annoyed that his number one suspect had turned into a victim. Jasper, after alerting us, had gone to fetch Aaron.

Simone shoved me aside, looked into the room for five seconds, and then spun back into the corridor.

“Eurgh.” She buried her head in her hands. “What a waste.”

“I know, he didn’t deserve that.” I put an arm around her.

She picked it off like seaweed. “That scarf’s dry-clean only.”

She took off, shaking her head.

“Excuse me? Can I see?” Royce was still trying to get his nose in the room; due to his stature, all he could do was push against the forest of shoulders. “Come on!”

“You’ll contaminate the crime scene,” Lisa said, turning around.

“I think you’ll benefit from my medical expertise,” he huffed.

“That’s in doubt, seeing as he was supposed to be your killer.”

“Maybe he couldn’t live with the guilt,” Royce protested. “Did himself in.”

“Stabbing yourself in the neck with a pen doesn’t seem a reliable method of suicide,” Majors said. “Besides, I don’t think many people tear apart their room and desperately try to stem the bleeding if they’ve done it to themselves.”

“Let me examine the body and I’ll tell you.”

“Royce.” I couldn’t resist. I moved my body slightly more in front of the door. “I don’t think you should be examining anything here. I’m told your whole background is a myth. You were never a pathologist, you were just an intern. Your bio’s as inflated as your ego.”

“You were happy to take my advice when it suited you,” he shot back. “I have studied for decades! I have two degrees. I went to the same university as Arthur Conan Doyle, I’ll have you know. That’s my bona fides. And,” he complained, “the Sunday Times said I had a very good grasp of realism.”

The Sunday Times had clearly not met Royce face-to-face.

“Well, in keeping with your actual experience in forensics labs, if we need a coffee I’ll be sure to let you know.”

Royce was shaking. “If you continue to treat me with such disrespect, I’ll . . . I’ll . . . I’ll withhold my diagnosis on the cause of death.”

“He’s got half a pen jammed in his throat,” I said. “I think we’ll figure it out.”

At this, Royce stormed off, forcing Brooke to step into the kitchenette alcove as he passed. She joined the back of the group, but Lisa put her hand on Brooke’s shoulder and guided her away. “It’s pretty gory in there,” she said. “You’re too young to see this.”

Wolfgang, in the end, was the first to enter the room. He stepped over Wyatt’s legs and peered at the paper on the desk, thumbing through the top few pages. I followed him in, looking around the room for more clues, but, given its size, I’d already spotted most things of note from the doorway. I couldn’t decide whether the room had been torn apart in search of something, or whether it had been the chaos of the deadly struggle. Wyatt’s bag was zipped on the floor. If someone was looking for something, they hadn’t searched all that hard.

Over Wolfgang’s shoulder I could see the top page of the stack on the desk: a manuscript with the title, typed in neat typewriter font, Life, Death and Whiskey. Then the words First draft and our departure date from Darwin, which meant he’d finished it, or at least typed the cover page, on the first day. Underneath, hand-scrawled in blue ink: by Henry McTavish. The story told itself: McTavish had finished the manuscript, signed it and handed it to Wyatt, and that had kicked off the argument I’d overheard on the first night.

“It’s not a Morbund novel,” Wolfgang said, looking up from the manuscript. I painted on some surprise: he didn’t know I’d heard Wyatt complaining about exactly that. “But it’s also not crime. It’s, well—it’s literary fiction.” He raised his eyebrows. “It’s not that bad.”

That this was perhaps the first compliment I’d heard Wolfgang ever give did not escape me. It seemed to surprise even him.

“McTavish was writing literary fiction?” Majors said.

“I mean, it’s still McTavish. He’ll never shake all his foibles—a writer’s prose is like a tattoo. Some habits die hard. But he’s improved in some areas.” Wolfgang seemed to realize he was being kind, because he chucked in an “I suppose.”

I thought about Simone pinching the air at Wolfgang’s sales. No wonder Wyatt was upset about the novel. It wasn’t just a departure from McTavish’s well-known character, it was a shift to a potentially lower-selling genre. But it was an interesting shift, and one that humanized McTavish a little in my eyes. Even he, after all those books he’d sold, wanted to be taken seriously.

“Lisa,” I said. “Time for you to flex. Who owns Life, Death and Whiskey now? Legally?”

Lisa thought for a second. “It’s still owned by McTavish, really, even if he’s dead. Copyright is generally the creator’s death plus seventy years. So yesterday plus seventy, I suppose.”

“But Wyatt was going to make money out of this—that’s why Royce thought he was behind the murder. McTavish delivers an out-of-genre book, so Wyatt knocks him off and suddenly its value skyrockets. Right?”

“Yes, but only from the increased sales,” Lisa said. “Wyatt’s right to publish the work wouldn’t have changed at all. He either has a contract, which he will now hold with McTavish’s estate, or he doesn’t have a current contract, and that means he has to buy it from the estate.”

“Henry was a lifelong bachelor,” Wolfgang said. “No family.”

“So where does the copyright land?”

“There will either be beneficiaries in the will,” Lisa said, “or I suppose it would go to probate, and they’ll find a suitable recipient.”

“And people can claim they are suitable recipients, right?”

“Yes, that’s what probate means—they manage all that.” Lisa shrugged. “But in Henry’s case, who could?”

“Long-lost brothers, et cetera et cetera,” Wolfgang muttered, nose still in the pages. “They’ll come out of the woodwork when there’s money involved.”

“And Wyatt’s not a suitable claim?”

“Not based on being Henry’s publisher, no.”

“They have a long relationship though,” Majors said, over by the vanity mirror and small cupboards. “It’s not crazy to think Wyatt could have been the beneficiary of Henry’s estate. Lifelong friends might make their way into a will. It gives Wyatt motive, again, for murder. But motive for murdering Wyatt—well, the person most likely to benefit would be second in line. Hey, that pen in his throat has Gemini branding on it. Where do you get one of those?”

“Publishing gift,” I said. “Royce has one.”

“He had it during his little speech,” Wolfgang said. “Dare I say, he made a great effort for us to see it in his hand.” I pictured Royce picking through the gathering, making sure the pen pointed at every one of us. It was a sharp insight.

“McTavish probably had one,” Lisa said. “Did you see a similar pen in his suite?”

I shook my head. The only pen I’d seen was a felt-tip. Then again, I hadn’t been the first one there. What had Brooke said? I came for a souvenir.

“And you,” Wolfgang said. I had to follow his gaze to see who he was looking at. Lisa. “Before you changed publishers.”

“Maybe I have one somewhere,” Lisa said. “Buried in a box at home, no doubt. I was published by Gemini a long time ago.”

“Convenient,” Wolfgang said.

“What about this?” Majors was pointing at the cupboard, where two wooden boxes were lined up next to the miniature safe, which was open and empty. She cracked one box. Inside, atop a white silk cloth, lay a Gemini pen. She checked the other, similarly stocked. I’d never realized, but the case for a fancy pen looks very similar to a coffin. “Maybe there was a third.”

“What the hell are you all doing?” Aaron asked from the doorway. Jasper and Harriet hovered behind: they must have fetched him.

“Investigating,” I said.

“Thinking,” Lisa said.

“Reading,” Wolfgang said.

“Out. Out. Out!” Aaron ushered us into the corridor and shut the door. “I can’t believe you’re making me say this, but could you not play games around a dead body?”

“It’s not a game,” I said. “If there’s a killer on this train, we want to find out who it is before they get another one of us.”

“Another one?” Brooke whimpered.

“How soon can the police get here?” I asked Aaron.

“We’re in the middle of the desert—they can’t.”

“Send a chopper,” I said.

“They’re all occupied, water-bombing the bushfires.” He was chewing his lip. “None spare.” That bastard bird, I thought to myself.

“Let’s head back to Alice Springs,” Majors said. “What’s that, six hours or so?”

“Oh, I’ll just pull a U-turn then, shall I?”

“Well, stop the train and call a bus,” I said.

“This is still a working freight line. We have to reach our stops so the freight trains can overtake us.”

“Well, change the blooming freight schedules,” Wolfgang said. He was scarily intimidating in full flight, even in his striped pajamas; he towered over Aaron. “I want off this junk heap right now.”

Aaron finally snapped. “Listen! None of you are detectives, or police. Just as we did last time we found a body, I’m going to ask you to go back to your cabins and wait. We’ll stop at Manguri, where an officer will come on board, we’ll let the freight train that’s behind us pass us, and then we’ll hoof it straight to Adelaide.”

“What about Coober Pedy?” Lisa asked. “That’s supposed to be next on the itinerary.”

“It’s a small town, but it’s at least a thousand people, right?” I added.

“We’re not stopping at Coober Pedy,” Aaron said, “we’re stopping at Manguri, which is the closest point on the train line to Coober Pedy. Manguri is not a full station: it’s a platform in the middle of the desert designed for freight to pass us, which we have no choice except to head to unless we want to be barreled into from behind. There’s forty kilometers of mine shafts between us and the town. Trust me: the best plan is to pull over at Manguri, let the freight pass us, and then we’ll go directly to Adelaide. I’m hoping to get there about twelve hours before our original arrival time.”

Wolfgang was already marching off. “Well, I’m hoping not to die,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ll take my meals in my room, please.”

Aaron put his hands out flat, as if to exaggerate that he had nothing better for us. Cynthia arrived with a chair and sat it down in the corridor. It was clear this was on instruction: she was a guard.

Adrenaline faded and the time started to sink in; it was almost dawn. It felt strange to say good night, so oddly formal but also not quite enough for the situation. Phrases like “sleep well” hummed with the hidden meaning of “stay safe.” “See you tomorrow” became a dark question. But we said our pleasantries anyway, slowly splitting off to our rooms. Lisa was the last one left as I reached my door. Her room was closer to the bar, which means she’d deliberately followed me past her room and down to mine.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Love or money?”

“It can’t just be money. Everyone with the financial motive to kill McTavish doesn’t have the motive to kill Wyatt.” I was thinking of Jasper specifically; my late-night rumination that he might have wanted to remove the competition seemed misguided now. To kill McTavish to secure a book deal had made enough sense to make him a suspect in my mind last night, but it gave him possibly the least motive to kill Wyatt, who he’d just struck a deal with. “How did you know this would happen?”

Lisa furrowed her brow. “I didn’t say that.”

“You said that something would happen and I’d think you were the murderer. Perhaps you expected the body to be found later in the morning. Maybe Jasper blew it by discovering it early. Is that what you meant?”

She looked both ways. The darkened corridor was empty, the shadows of trackside foliage whipping across her face in a flickering roulette wheel. She leaned in, lowered her voice. “Is that really the type of question you want to be asking when we’re all alone?”

“You’ve got to sell it a little more if you want to sound threatening. Put some shoulders into it,” I said. “Besides, you followed me here. I’ve been thinking about what it means to write all this down. You want to make sure you’re in this book, to be a large enough character to have your story written. That’s why you’re going out of your way to cause a scene. I don’t think you’re a killer, but there’s something you want me to say for you.”

Her cheek twitched.

“You can’t defame the dead,” I went on. “If that’s what this is about.” When she remained silent, I probed, “I didn’t know Wyatt published you.”

“Wyatt published my debut. The book about the car thief. It’s not like I’m hiding it. Anyone can look that up. I changed houses for this one. Purely a business decision”—she held a finger up—“before you get ahead of yourself.”

“I wasn’t.”

“I believe that even less than Aaron’s reason keeping us on this death trap.” She leaned in closer still. “Here’s that legal expertise you wanted from me. I’ve worked with law enforcement enough to know how they work. They could easily bus us into Coober Pedy. It’s small but there’s a hotel, a tiny airport. But you introduce more links in the chain—a bus to town, for example—and the weaker it gets. Right now we’re sealed up tight. No one on. No one off.”

It dawned on me. “They wouldn’t.”

“They would. They don’t want this killer to get away, and so they’ve locked us in with them. All the way home.”

Chapter 27

Don’t walk backward in Coober Pedy, so the saying goes.

Coober Pedy is famous for two things. First, the unforgiving heat, which forces much of the one-thousand-person township to live underground. Their houses are burrowed into mountainsides, with rock-walled living rooms like nuclear bunkers from the 1950s. Front doors are either entranceways carved into cliffsides or hatches in the very ground. Surprisingly, given the first, the second thing the town is famous for is not vitamin D deficiency but opal mining. Even more uniquely, given the riches beneath the earth, it’s not entirely overrun by a multibillion-dollar mining conglomerate; rather, it’s largely mined by a mix of industrial operations and hopeful prospectors. Rumor has it the town is filled with secret millionaires who choose to project an exterior of poverty in case people suspect their plots are valuable and move in on their dig.

Opal mining is a simple matter: dig hole, check hole, leave hole. Coober Pedy mandates that mine shafts are to be left open, the mound of excavated dirt left beside the shaft. This serves two purposes: preventing people from falling through an improperly filled mine shaft, and declaring that a site has been explored. The consequence is that the desert is pockmarked with dig sites, mine shafts and mounds of dirt. Though Coober Pedy was nowhere in sight from the station at Manguri, where the train now stood still, these excavations peppered my view like an ever-expanding asteroid belt. Each dig is often only a meter from the next, with drops of varying depths and lethality. So the general guidance is to watch your step. Hence, never walk backward.

I wasn’t in too much danger of falling down a mine shaft, given that we’d been confined to our rooms for the rest of the journey. I didn’t envy Aaron and Cynthia’s duplicates down the other end of the train, where nonfestival guests wouldn’t know about either McTavish’s potential murder or Wyatt’s definite one, and would just be annoyed about having their once-in-a-lifetime trip cut short.

I looked out the window at the thousands of termite-hill mine shaft markers. I was trying to determine, among the many theories, motives and suspects, where the truth was. Solving a crime was much like opal mining. Dig hole, check hole, leave hole. If I’m honest with you, I thought I’d solved enough of it to rule out four suspects by this point, and I needed only a single piece to eliminate the rest. I just had to dig one more hole.

A Land Cruiser four-wheel-drive kicked up a plume of dust, weaving through a track cut between the opal plots, and pulled up alongside the train. The car wasn’t marked as police, and neither was the man who got out, but it was clear that this was either an officer or a detective. He carried a small backpack and wore a wide-brimmed hat that was floppy with regular use, the complete opposite of the straight-from-the-packet tourist gear that Douglas wore. The man wore a beige set of ill-fitting farmer’s clothes and had a moustache thick enough that I figured he’d grown it to stop flies from getting in his mouth. He leaned back through the Land Cruiser’s door and spoke into a two-way radio mounted on the dash, then walked across to the train and rapped on the side of the bar carriage.

The corridor was so silent—the other guests being better at following rules than I was—that leaving my room felt illicit. Having spent three days in motion, rattling tracks underneath us, the quiet was even more profound. Murder seems exciting in fiction, but it’s a roller coaster of adrenaline in real life, and sometimes you need a moment alone. This was the mood of the carriage: everyone withdrawn and reflective.

Cynthia was asleep in the chair outside Wyatt’s room. I tiptoed past her.

In the bar carriage, Aaron was chatting to the police officer when he spotted me. His arm went up immediately, finger pointed. “No,” he said. “No. No. Not this again. Not you. We have professionals now. Back to your room, please.”

“I want to know what’s going on,” I said.

“Is this the amateur detective?” The policeman’s moustache twitched with a smirk. “Who’s been helping out?”

“He’s not helping,” Aaron said firmly. “They’ve been running amok, if I’m honest with you.”

“Ernest.” I crossed the bar and offered the policeman my hand.

He shook it. “Detective Hatch.”

“Please, Detective,” Aaron begged. “This farce has gone on long enough. I don’t think we should be enabling this further.”

“I needed to talk to Ernest at some point, it may as well be now. I’m sure his contributions will be valuable.”

I couldn’t help but puff my chest a little. My contributions would be valuable. Damn right they would be. The detective put one hand on my back and shepherded me into a seat. I could tell, even through my shirt, that he had thick, rough hands. He looked settled, unrushed: I figured he planned to travel with us to Adelaide and then catch the next train back to Manguri to pick up his car.

“Tell me what you know, partner,” Hatch said, and I’ll admit to a little flutter of excitement at partner.

“Well, Henry McTavish collapsed in the middle of an event yesterday morning. We suspect poison. Possibly heroin, though we’re open to other theories.”

“We?”

“Alan Royce and I.”

“Ah, the one who used to be the pathologist?” Hatch held both hands clasped in front of him. I figured he was one of those detectives whose mind was electric enough not to need notes. A real Morbund type. He nodded slowly. “Well, you’ve got that right, we think. Heroin. According to the bloods.”

What do you know, I thought, intern or not, Royce has come through.

“So what else?” the detective asked.

“Most people here had some reason to do McTavish in,” I said. “I’d say it ranges from dislike to strong hate, depending on the suspect. Starting with S. F. Majors, for example. She thinks that McTavish—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Hatch unclasped his hands and waved my explanation away. “Let’s talk about all the facts before we get into theories. What about the second murder?”

“That was earlier this morning. We found Wyatt, McTavish’s publisher, stabbed through the throat after the train left Alice Springs. Now, that makes it tricky: arguably Wyatt had the most motive to kill McTavish, as he stood to make a good deal of money out of the increased posthumous value of the next book.” I described to him the behind-the-scenes of why McTavish’s last words—literally, his handwritten name on the cover page likely the last mark he left on the world—would increase in value for a publisher. “But who has the motive to kill Wyatt? Well, if we look at our suspects again, we could think about Lisa Fult—”

“Yep. That’s excellent work. Yep.”

“I haven’t really told you my theories yet.”

“We’ll get there, we’ll get there.” He reached into his breast pocket and now took out a notebook. He clicked his pen, then spun it around his knuckles like a poker chip. “Now, Wyatt Lloyd. You found his body once you were on the move. Well, Jasper did. He’s in the room next door, said he could hear everyone traipsing past and, once he was awake, could smell blood. Did anyone see Wyatt leave the dinner at the Telegraph Station?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I can’t speak for everyone else. Would you like me to follow that up in my next interviews?”

“Let’s take it one step at a time. Before we assign anything more to your caseload.” Click, click. The pen spun. “So no one’s seen him since the dinner. It’s conceivable he died before you left Alice Springs?”

“I don’t think so. The blood looked fresh . . . ish.”

“Fresh-ish?” He rolled the word around like it was a different language. “That’s Royce’s medical opinion?”

I cleared my throat. “Not exactly. I decided Royce was a bit of an Achilles heel, so I thought it best if he kept his distance on this one.”

“That seems like a reasonable decision. Take tire-kickers out and use your own, extensive, experience.” He lingered on the word extensive.

My smugness was rapidly eroding. I realized his phrasing—caseload, partner—was the same you’d use to send a child down to the shops for some ice cream. Now, I’ve got a veeery important mission for you, Deputy!

“And so the medical consensus of Wyatt’s time of death was developed”—he swirled the pen in the air—“how, exactly?”

“It was fairly obvious.”

“Yes. Fresh-ish. Very good.”

“Are you taking the piss?”

“No, Mr. Cunningham, I’m taking this very seriously.” He wrote something down. “So it’s conceivable that Wyatt Lloyd was murdered before the Ghan departed Alice Springs.”

“I suppose. I mean the blood was fresh.”

“Ish.”

“Yes,” I relented. “He could have been dead awhile. I don’t know.”

“Ah.”

“Look.” I leaned forward. “Did you want my analysis of each suspect? I’ve conducted several interrogations.”

“Interrogations? Impressive.”

“In my opinion—”

“I think we’ll stick to the facts for now”—he smiled—“Mr. Cunningham.”

“You’re not interested in my take on this at all, are you? You were just buttering me up.”

His teeth showed through his bristles, like a white tiger glimpsed behind a thatch of jungle. “No. I don’t need your shambolic theories, and I could do without your theatrics. I just need you to help me ascertain some facts regarding the timelines.”

I turned to Aaron. “I’m not going to sit here and be patronized while there’s a killer loose on this train. Let me help you.”

“You’re perfectly safe. The killer’s not on the train at all,” Aaron said. “The arrest was made at Alice Springs.”

“That’s enough, thank you,” Hatch said firmly, but Aaron had already given away too much. Hatch turned back to me and I realized: even if he didn’t care for my deductions, he needed me to tell him something.

“You arrested someone? Who?” I flicked through the Rolodex of everyone I’d seen since boarding the train. I swore I’d seen the others board. Maybe with the exception of Wyatt. Had he really been killed before we left the station? I knew Hatch put little stock in my medical opinions, but even he would likely admit I could tell the difference between fresh and dried blood. “I don’t understand who else you could have arrested in Alice Springs.” I turned to Aaron. “I don’t think we’re safe at all.”

“She’s in custody,” Hatch assured me. “You’re safe.”

“She?”

Hatch’s eyes shrunk with his mistake. Suddenly I understood. Why he’d wanted to talk to me. Why I hadn’t gotten a call or a text message back before I lost phone reception. Why he’d been worried about Aaron telling me too much.

I blanched. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

“Juliette left the dinner before you. Did you see her again before departure?”

“That’s ridiculous.” I made to stand.

Hatch put a heavy hand on my shoulder and pushed me down. Despite his ill-fitting clothing, he carried some serious bulk, and his strength surprised and overpowered me. “I need you to answer the question.” He squeezed slightly. “And it’s not ridiculous. Juliette was the wearer of the scarf that a dead man had wrapped around his fist. Unless you can explain that away, I need to know if you saw her between dinner and departure.”

“You’ve got it wrong. The scarf is Simone’s, Juliette was just borrowing it.”

“So Juliette gave it back to Simone, then?”

“Well . . . no . . . but she left it behind at breakfast.” A memory struck me. “Wyatt picked it up! Because he recognized it was Simone’s. He told me he was going to give it back to her.”

Hatch set his eyes on mine. “So the only person who can back you up that Juliette was no longer in possession of the scarf is a dead one?”

“It’s the truth,” I pleaded. “And no. I didn’t see her after the dinner.”

“But she left before you, right? Caught a cab. I’ve talked to the driver already—he dropped her at the station in Alice.”

I was shaking with incredulity. “Maybe because it’s the center of town? Her bags were still in the cabin, untouched. She didn’t get back on.”

“Or that’s what she wants you to think. Why would she leave the train? People dream of going on this trip and she leaves early? Unless she’s running from something.”

This question was acidic. Hatch must have known the real reason she’d left. Juliette would have rationally explained her motivations when they’d questioned her. Surely.

I’d had enough. “Can I go now?” I asked firmly.

Hatch released the pressure on my shoulder and replaced it with a gentle pat, the type a doctor gives a child getting a needle: See, it’s not that bad. “Sure. Thanks for your expertise.”

I couldn’t resist having the last word as I stood up. “My fiancée is not a murderer.”

“Fiancée-ish, though,” Hatch snarled. “Isn’t it?”

I didn’t entertain it. Not even for a second. It didn’t cross my mind.

Juliette was innocent—she had to be. And that piece of blind faith, which Juliette had so wanted me to have twelve hours ago, one knee in the dirt, awoke something new within me. A Golden Age detective doesn’t really need characterization or motive, so to speak: intellectual curiosity is their raison d’être. It’s enough for them to scratch an itch, to solve a puzzle simply because it’s there to be solved. I’d started in that place, merely curious at the piecing together, not invested in what the answer might mean. My motives had broadened—I’d wanted to build my book out of it—and then, Wyatt’s death being so much more violent than McTavish’s, plot seeking had given way to fear. But all these motives—curiosity to cashing in to safety—are selfish ones. It’s exactly what Juliette had said about whose story I thought this was. Mine.

I pictured Juliette sitting on a cold aluminum bench in a holding cell. The detective act was no longer a charade. I didn’t just want to solve this, I had to. Fast.

I had this revelation as two things happened simultaneously. The first was that Aaron’s voice floated over the intercom, announcing the tracks were clear and we would depart Manguri for the final stretch to Adelaide in five minutes. The second was that I noticed that Detective Hatch’s Land Cruiser had a broken window, and a shadow was sitting in the driver’s seat.

I darted from the room. I didn’t have to go all the way to the bar to bump into Hatch, who was peering into Wyatt’s room, tutting as he examined the scene. Cynthia, now awake, stood up as I approached. Hatch turned around and put an arm out, blocking me.

“I think you’re better off in your cabin,” he said. But I could see through the gap between his arm and body, and I saw enough to confirm what I’d suspected. “Come on, mate,” he added. “This is better done with lawyers and courts now.”

I was tempted to snap at him, “Somebody’s stealing your Land Cruiser,” but instead I put my hands up in surrender and backed off apologetically. I did my best to look casual as I headed to my room, but my legs itched to run and I settled into a stiff-legged speed-walk. I quickly checked that Hatch had turned around as I approached my room, then skipped past it and kept going to the carriage divider. Once I was through the door, I let my legs fly. I ran through the remaining carriages full pelt, just about bouncing off the walls of the tiny corridors, until I was finally at the back, where I wrenched open the door to the smoking deck.

The heat of the desert hit me like a wall. The white glare made me wince. Then the engines of the train rumbled to life and, with a clank, we started to roll: Adelaide bound. I looked out over the end of the train, where the ground beneath had turned into a conveyor belt. The speed increased, from a walk to a jog to a run. The ground started to blur. I couldn’t hesitate any longer.

I was done digging holes. It was time to find some opals.

I gripped the iron railing and vaulted over the fence, landing with a crunch in the middle of the tracks.

Chapter 28

I didn’t have time to think about the consequences of the train pulling away into the distance, leaving me without shade, food or water, forty kilometers of barren desert between me and the nearest town. Or the fact that I was on my own chasing a potential murderer and, not only that, but on foot, while they had a vehicle. I was acting on instinct and adrenaline alone.

I suspected they’d steal it at some stage, I just hadn’t known when. But then I’d seen the shadow sitting in the Land Cruiser and remembered Cynthia being asleep, and I knew it had happened. A quick glimpse over Hatch’s shoulder into Wyatt’s room was all I’d needed: the table by the window was empty. Life, Death and Whiskey was gone.

I sprinted down the tracks—the movement of the train had taken me past the Land Cruiser and so I had to head back to it. The rattle of the Ghan faded, and now I could hear the revving clunk of an engine that someone was desperately trying to hot-wire, sweaty fingers slipping off the wires as they saw me coming. I was maybe fifty meters from the vehicle when they gave up and stepped out into the desert, looked at me for a second and then ran across the road and into the opal fields.

“Lisa!” I yelled. “Wait!”

I peeled off the tracks and into the fields myself, past a gigantic skull-and-crossbones sign that read: Warning: Uncovered mine shafts, do not enter on foot. I dashed past it. Lisa was ahead of me, the distance shrunk by ten or so meters. I kept an eye on her while trying to keep my gaze down. All around me the ground opened up into gaping wells, mounds of dirt beside them. Lisa was being slightly more cautious around the mine shafts than I was, so I was closing in on her.

“I know what happened!” I yelled. “Please. Let’s talk about it.”

Lisa didn’t stop. And so I kept running, weaving between the holes and the dirt and gaining, step by step. Closer. Closer. I focused on her back as the distance closed. Thirty seconds and I’d have her.

My left foot slid sideways. I looked down and saw cascading silt pouring into a deep black hole. My arms pinwheeled as I regained my balance. I stood for a second, peering into the hole, breathing deep relief.

When I looked up, Lisa was gone.

I whipped my head around but she was nowhere to be seen. The entire opal field was desolate, empty. Mounds of dirt surrounded me like statues. Spindly insect legs of cranes and drills rose up in the distance against the bright blue skyline. I listened. No footsteps.

She couldn’t have outrun me so quickly; my rebalancing had only taken a couple of seconds. Had she fallen? I figured I might have heard a scream. She had to be hiding, must have ducked behind one of the dirt mounds. She might even be moving from mound to mound, circling back to the car. Or sneaking up behind me. I imagined hands on my back and spun around. Nothing. Just me and hundreds of silent mounds.

I edged forward, now prioritizing silence over speed and peering behind each mound as I passed it. “Come out, Lisa,” I said. “The Ghan has left. It’s just us here.”

I kept moving forward, in a wide sweep, giving myself as broad a view as possible of the backs of the dirt pillars. And then I spotted an elbow. It was indistinct, about three mounds down to the left of me—Lisa had indeed been moving back toward the car, hopping mound to mound while my head was turning. I’d only caught the barest glimpse. I took a sideways step to get a better view.

The saying should really be to never walk backward or sideways in Coober Pedy, but it wasn’t really the right time to be pedantic. This time I’d taken a heavier step, straight in the middle of the shaft: open air. I pitched forward immediately, my whole leg in the hole. My chest hit the rim, and the air was knocked out of me. My other leg slid in after. My hands scrabbled for grip, but there was nothing but gravel, tiny shards of dirt and stone that shredded my fingertips, ripping my nails on my gloveless hand. I tried to yell but couldn’t draw breath. My feet paddled air underneath me. I tried to ground my forearms on the rim, but they kept slipping as gravity dragged me down. I had no idea how deep the hole was, but even if the fall wasn’t enough to kill me, surely, out here, I’d never be found. A broken leg and a week to die, down in the dark. I hoped I died on impact.

I heard footsteps, running. It was hard to tell where they were coming from over my thrashing. My scrabbling got more desperate. But all I was doing now was dislodging more and more dirt, creating, unwillingly, an almost perfect funnel for me to slip down. I could feel blood on my fingertips, sticky and warm. There goes a second set of fingerprints.

I slid backward another couple of inches and knew I was gone. Red dust was in my hair, my eyes, caked in my mouth. Bite the dust, huh? Tears rolled down my face. I wondered if I would be able to see the sky from the bottom, or if I would die in the dark. I thought of Juliette, alone in that cell. I wondered if she had a small window, if she would look up at the same sliver of blue that I might see from the pit, and it made me feel not quite so alone.

I fell.

Chapter 29

A hand clamped around my wrist.

A violent jerk rippled through my shoulder. The drop halted. I looked up. Silhouetted against the sun was Lisa, legs splayed, heels gouging into the earth on the rim of the pit. We hung there for a second, me dangling in the hole. She was a strong enough counterweight, due to our relative positioning, to stop the fall, but not to get me back out again. I dug my knees into the wall and grappled up it, and somehow we overcame gravity to spill me over the top and onto the dirt. I rested my cheek against the ground, marveling at my breath. Lisa sat, knees up, her wrists balanced on top.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I didn’t kill him,” Lisa said softly. “Either of them. And because I’m not a killer, I’m not about to let you fester in the bottom of one of these.” She wiped her nose with the back of one hand. Her hair had been whipped around by the run. “But I don’t suppose you believe any of that.”

I rolled onto my back, still catching my breath. Jagged rocks dug into my neck. This is what’s missing from action scenes in novels like this; sometimes everyone involved needs a bit of a break.

“I believe exactly that, actually,” I said, propping myself onto my elbows. “And I know what he did to you. In Edinburgh, two thousand and three. This supposed fling isn’t the truth. He raped you.”

“He didn’t—” I thought she was about to deny it, but then something squeaked in her throat. “He didn’t stop.” She locked eyes with me. “I tried. I really did. McTavish told everyone I’d wanted to. I was the young hopeful newbie, he was the older big shot. It was so hard to be believed. They all thought I was starstruck. It wasn’t like that.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’ve never told anyone this. But Majors was at the bar, before we all split off. I’m pretty sure, deep down, she knew something was wrong. I went to her, begged her to back me up. But she stayed quiet for the same reason I ended up silencing myself. You wouldn’t understand. I want to be known for the art I made, for my words and my voice, not for the mark some man left on me.” She sighed. “Of course, at first I did want to speak out. Even if it was on my own. I wanted justice. I’d tried to fight him off and had scratched him on the cheek, so I had his DNA under my fingernails. But would you believe it? There was a bloody admin error and they mislabeled my test. By the time they found it, it was inadmissible because no one could be sure it hadn’t been tampered with. Wyatt threatened me, said he’d bury my career, and by then I thought I had no other option, so I signed an NDA. There was money too. But if I’m honest, it had become my word against his, and signing seemed like the only path out. And I . . . needed the money.” Her jaw set hard. “How’d you figure it out?”

“A few reasons. Wyatt published your first book, and you moved away from him for the second, which hints at a falling out of sorts. Of course you wouldn’t want to work with the man who had enabled Henry McTavish to get away with what he had. But that only becomes clear once the rest clicks into place. My agent, Simone, used to be McTavish’s assistant. He has a certain . . . shall we say tone to his interactions with women.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“He’s an outright sleaze, if you prefer. But that’s conjecture. As is the reason I suspect that you and Majors refused to support each other’s accusations after Edinburgh. You were there together, after all. Surely each of you saw something that might help the other.”

Lisa had told me this herself: It’s not like she was on the witness stand. Without Majors, Lisa lacked a character witness. And with her physical evidence ruled out, there was no chance for a criminal proceeding. “Majors could have been a second voice, changed the your-word-against-his narrative, but she didn’t come to your aid. A year later she realized that McTavish stole her idea for his new book, and her only evidence came from that very same night. You were a witness to the conversation when Majors told McTavish her story. She turned to you, but by then you’d already signed your own NDA. Besides, you must have been too hurt to back up her story. Am I close?”

“I don’t blame her.” Lisa tossed a rock into the pit, watched it disappear into the dark. I didn’t hear it hit the bottom, which made my stomach quiver. “She didn’t have much of a choice. They would have ruined her career. And I would have had to break my NDA to back her up. But it hurt. So I guess I chose not to help her too. The number of times I’ve seen it.” She shook her head. “The world can’t stomach two strong successful women in the same place, so we have to hate each other, we have to compete. That’s how people like Wyatt designed it. I’ve got nothing against her, I just . . . let Wyatt and Henry win. Even if I didn’t know that was what I was doing at the time.” Another rock sailed into the abyss.

“That’s the key to how I knew,” I said. “Wyatt wouldn’t have taken losing your new book to a new publisher too easily. And McTavish was a bitter soul. So they cooked up a stunt. Of course, your new publisher would have been delighted to see the Henry McTavish quote on the cover, even with the caveat that you weren’t to see it before this trip. I thought at first that you were overwhelmed when you saw the quote, but you weren’t: you were horrified. Because that’s the exact word Henry used in a message he sent you. Simone’s his old assistant, and Royce is a perv, but I heard the same word from both of them. Firecracker. So by putting that word on something that was supposed to be yours, they marked it. Forever. A humiliation only you would know.”

“This all sounds like a pretty good reason to kill both of them,” Lisa said. “You still have no reason to believe me, so why do you?”

“I figure seeing the quote was the final straw. You marched into McTavish’s room and told him you didn’t care about the NDA and that you were done keeping his secrets. He wrote out a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, tried to pay you off, the same as he did before, but you burned it in front of him. The world’s changed: you hoped people might listen to you this time. You were done. Was that when he grabbed you?”

Lisa nodded. “Yeah.”

I sighed. “I’m disappointed. I thought we had a bit of truth-telling going on. Why bother lying?”

Lisa swallowed thickly. She’d stopped throwing rocks into the hole but was peering down it like jumping in was a viable way to get out of the conversation.

I kept on. “Henry didn’t grab you. He was crippled down his left side; his left hand was always clutching his cane. If he was going to reach out and grab you, he would have done it with his right hand, so if you were in front of him, which you’d have to be to hit him in the nose, he would have grabbed your left side. Your bruise is on the wrong arm.”

Lisa sucked her teeth.

“It’s okay,” I continued. “This isn’t an accusation, I’m just trying to get all the pieces on the board. You were always going to hit McTavish, that’s why you went there. You headbutted him straight in the nose. Partly because it felt good, and partly because you could pocket a bloody tissue. You gave yourself the bruise so you could claim it was self-defense if McTavish dared to pursue the injury, but that was just insurance: you knew he’d stay quiet, given what you were talking about. What you really wanted was the tissue. Well, the blood on it, anyway. Here’s where it gets tricky.”

Lisa laughed, but it sounded shaky. “Why would I want a bloody tissue?”

“You had a child. His child. You kept it. That’s why you took the hush money in the first place, because you were pregnant. Now, fast-forward all these years, you wanted his DNA to prove it. It’s taken you two decades to write your second book, partly because of how you felt about the industry—how hard it was to trust anyone with your work, with your life, again—and partly because you were raising a kid on your own. Staging a fight is fine and all, and you walked away with what you wanted: the DNA. But then McTavish dies and you realize that you might be the prime suspect. There’s the history between you, and now there’s also physical evidence of a violent altercation. And now you’ve got even clearer motive, because the copyright in all his books, including the new one, should go to his estate. And your child is the estate. Or at least that’s supposed to be what the DNA test will prove. So you pinch the manuscript to protect it, and hope that by the time anyone realizes you’re gone, we might have caught the real killer. Your only problem was that hot-wiring a car in real life is far more difficult than just researching it. And, of course, that you had to leave your daughter behind.”

Lisa paled so much I think she got immediately sunburned.

I stood up, dusted my knees. “Let’s put your car thieving to the test, because you need to help me get back on the train. Then Brooke can tell me her side of the story herself.”

Chapter 30

It took twice as long as it should have to walk back to the Land Cruiser. Even on flat, safe ground we walked like we were crossing a river on loose stones. I checked every spot I put my foot twice.

“I thought I’d hidden it so well,” Lisa said. “I didn’t want Henry to know.”

“Like mother, like daughter,” I said, pointing to her bruises. “Wrong arm.”

Her shoulders rose. “He hurt her?”

“No. Brooke’s right arm is sunburned. The festival punters are all in carriages on the east side of the train—they paid for the tickets so they get the sunrise views. The writers are all on the west, so we get the sunset. Each cabin only gets sun half a day. If she was sitting by the window in a guest cabin, where she’s supposed to be, she should have had sunburn on her left arm, not her right. If she’d just been burned outside, it would be across both arms evenly. Which means she’s been staying in a writer’s cabin. That, and it was pretty obvious she was lying about her cabin number when I asked her. She’s someone’s plus-one.”

Lisa chuckled. We’d reached the Land Cruiser. I brushed flecks of broken window glass off the seat and hopped in the passenger side. Lisa crouched by the driver’s footwell, alongside the dislodged panel and dangling wires she’d been fiddling with before I gave chase. “Gosh,” she said. “All that out of a sunburned arm.”

“Not just the arm,” I said. “When Royce woke us all up, you made sure to slip out of your cabin quickly, so no one would see anyone else was inside. Royce only deliberately woke the writers, but of course knocking on your door woke her as well. Her curiosity got the better of her and she followed you. That’s why she was last to arrive, and why you were annoyed to see her when she sat down next to you. Then there was her fascination with McTavish, which didn’t quite fit her age; it just took me a while to figure out if it was psychopathic or not. Plus you guided her away from Wyatt’s body. You told her to be careful when she was skipping rocks in the canyon. You gave her aloe vera cream to use on her sunburn. That all points to a motherly instinct. That and the fact that she was in the Chairman’s Carriage looking for the manuscript.”

“Very good,” Lisa said, a cable in her mouth.

“And she knew too much about that night in Edinburgh, when she was conceived. She held on to a copy of the article with you all in it, for one thing. But she knew a lot about Majors’s plagiarism accusations too. She brushed it off as being public knowledge, but that’s not true: there’s barely been a proper plagiarism accusation on this trip, it’s all veiled threats. The only way Brooke would really know about what went on that night was if someone who was there told her.” Brooke had told me, when I thought she was talking about Majors: I should have believed her. But she’d been talking about her mother. “You told her to try to discredit McTavish.”

“She was fascinated by him—Henry himself, sure, given all his success, but it was mostly the idea of a father in general. She hit her teens and she had questions. I knew she would. I’d been spending a lot of time thinking about what to tell her. I couldn’t lie to her, but I also couldn’t bring myself to tell her what he did to me. I hoped that telling her about Majors would be enough for her to know he was bad news without me telling the whole story. I thought I’d never have to, that he was an ocean and a lifetime away. I thought she’d never meet him.”

“But she wanted a father figure, and so she built one herself. Out of his books,” I surmised. I’d been thinking back to S. F. Majors’s interpretation of obsession: The stalker might picture themselves having a certain relationship with this person. A connection that only they see. They insert themselves into a world they aren’t actually a part of. In this case, the connection was more literal, but the interpretation still held. MongrelWrangler22 had posted that they felt like he was speaking directly to them. A bedtime story. To Brooke, reading the Detective Morbund books was like talking to her dad. No wonder she didn’t want them to end.

“I indulged that. I figured it was harmless, healthy even. A bit of an outlet. Like I said, he was supposed to be a continent away.”

“Until this trip.”

“Exactly. Ouch.” Lisa sparked the cables against her fingertips and shook them, just as the engine sputtered and then roared. She hoisted herself into the driver’s seat and patted the dash. “Research pays off after all.”

Then we were moving. The only road at Manguri was the one bending away to Coober Pedy, so Lisa drove off-road parallel to the train track. The ground was flat enough to accommodate the train but ragged enough to jostle us roughly in our seats. The Ghan was a speck on the horizon ahead.

“When you were invited here, I imagine she would have begged to come with you?”

“Desperately. But I wasn’t having it. I wasn’t even going to accept the invitation—I certainly didn’t want to be anywhere near him. But she really wanted to finally meet him. We had a huge blow-out, screaming-the-grout-from-the-kitchen-tiles type stuff. And I told her, in the heat of the moment, what he’d done. That he’d raped me.”

“And she still wanted to come?” I said, despite already knowing the answer. I should have believed her.

“It made her want to come even more. You must understand, I didn’t sit her down and gently tell her the reality. I screamed it at her across the room.” Lisa took her eyes off the tracks, where the back of the Ghan had gotten closer, turning from a blurry lump to glinting steel, to read my face. “You clearly don’t have kids. Or if you do, not girls. She was livid, accused me of saying anything to get her to not go. She’s a smart girl, she wouldn’t have let anger override common sense, and she knows what men are capable of. But you’ve got to understand, she had this picture of him in her head. Her father. The writer of her favorite books, the teller of her bedtime stories. He’d been speaking to her for years through Morbund. She couldn’t replace that image she’d built so easily.”

“I imagine she’d have found a way to come without you, then.”

“She told me if I didn’t take her, she’d pay her own way. Sell her car if she had to. I figured I was better off here protecting her.”

“Looks like she wasn’t the one who needed protecting.”

“She wouldn’t have killed them.”

“I don’t think you believe that.”

My conversations with Brooke flashed through my head. Her sucking up the courage to introduce herself to McTavish. Him pressing his room key into her hand. The image of him that she’d built, in denial of her mother’s warning, crumbling in front of her. The key, squeezed so tight it cut into her palm. The note, which must have been originally attached to the whiskey: From an admirer. McTavish whispering to her: It’s a mighty fine drop to drink alone. Her telling me in the Chairman’s Carriage: Never meet your heroes.

Lisa’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. The man who raped her and the man who had covered it up were both dead. I didn’t have to say it.

Lisa would have had the same thoughts I did. I knew exactly why she had left Brooke alone. Even for a second. Even that it crossed your mind. Love doesn’t make you invincible to doubt. I knew that as well as any. Lisa knew that by leaving the train she would incriminate herself with the appearance of guilt, and it might give her daughter a head start.

Lisa had sought me out, told me what she had, in the hope that I would write it down. And that one day her daughter would read, and understand, what she’d done to save her.

The funny thing was, Brooke believed her mother capable of the very same crime. That was why she’d been at pains to introduce me to Majors’s possible motives: to distract me from her mother’s. Each protecting the other.

“Why take me back?” I asked.

“Because you’ve solved it. Haven’t you?”

I nodded, but with the bouncing of the Land Cruiser it was a bit more enthusiastic than I’d intended, so I added, “Almost.”

“And you don’t think it’s her. I can tell. So maybe she needs you.” She floored the accelerator and the engine whined. “That’s why I’m going to get you back on the train.”

I’d been so focused on her I was almost surprised when I looked up and saw the back of the Ghan filling my view. Lisa was nudging eighty, and she pulled up alongside it, dropping to seventy and holding close. From the outside, the calm meditative clack-clack was gone: the train kicked up an absolute clattering roar as it moved.

“You came after me not because you cared that I’d taken the manuscript,” Lisa shouted over the noise. “And not because you thought I was a murderer. You came to ask me something. And you haven’t asked me yet. You’ve just been telling me what you already know. Train’s coming up. So you’d better ask.”

“Majors. Is she telling the truth?”

“Seriously? Is that it?”

“You were there that night. I think she told McTavish a version of the story that wasn’t the true story from the papers. That’s the version he stole for Off the Rails. Right?”

“You jumped off a moving train to ask me that?”

“I had to know for sure.”

“You already do. Have you learned nothing about Henry McTavish? What he does?” She was nodding. “This is a man who takes from women. He took my body. And he took her mind.”

Chapter 31

It is much more difficult hanging out of a car window than they make it look in the movies, let alone jumping from one.

I had one hand on the side mirror and one hand on the roof as I maneuvered my way out of the car. The window didn’t wind all the way into the sill, so the glass dug into my thighs. The wind roared in my ears, the tires kicked dust into my eyes and my cheeks stung with the peppering of bugs. I squinted against the wind at the Ghan. Lisa was aiming for the smoking deck; she had the Land Cruiser as close to the tracks as she could go without hitting them. The deck was too high to jump onto easily, but I was pretty sure I could grab on to the fence and climb over.

We edged forward, now side by side. The fencing was just past my fingertips. I levered one foot up on the windowsill, found purchase, and tensed my legs.

“I’m going to jump!” I yelled to Lisa. “Keep it steady.”

Her mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear her reply above the wind and the train. I hoped she’d heard me. I reached an arm out toward the railing, took a deep breath and . . .

. . . the car jerked wildly underneath me, braking and swerving at the same time. I tilted dizzyingly sideways, face down to the blur of red dirt underneath me, before snapping back the other way, crunching a rib into the door frame. And then the back of the Ghan was rapidly approaching. We were going faster than it was, and I whipped my head inside just in time for the whoosh of the carriage to rattle past the window, shearing off the side mirror in an explosion of glass.

“Sorry. Telegraph pole,” Lisa said.

I looked out the back window to see a large column, shrinking behind us, by the tracks: she’d had to swerve around it. “Bit of a heads-up next time?”

“I did say not to jump.”

I looked at the train beside us. Lisa eased off the gas and drew back to the smoking deck again, this time a little behind it. I snuck a look at the speedometer. Fifty now. The train had slowed down slightly. “We might need a new plan. These heroics are a bit beyond me.”

Lisa thought for a second and then wrenched the wheel hard toward the tracks. We bounced over the rails, a shower of sparks flew out behind us, and then just as quickly she pulled the steering back, settling us exactly in the middle. The tracks ran between the wheels; we were now directly tailing the train.

I nodded, impressed. “That’s a better plan. Keep an eye on the speed. It seems to be slowing down slightly.”

“Thirty-eight,” she said.

I levered my way out of the window again, except this time instead of trying to jump sideways, I grappled my way around to the front until I was crouched on the bonnet. It’s not exactly the high-speed stuff of action films, given that we would have been able to perform this stunt in a school zone. My legs were jellied all the same. If I fell, the fall might not kill me. But if I went underneath the Land Cruiser, or if I got jammed between the car and the train, or if I went under the train itself, I figured I’d be a goner no matter the speed.

Lisa nudged forward. I heard a satisfying crunch of metal on metal; this was as close as we were going to get. It wouldn’t be as simple as walking across: it was hard for Lisa to match the speed, so the gap varied from nonexistent to terrifying as the Land Cruiser wavered forward and back. I adjusted myself to a runner’s starting position, keeping one hand in touch with the windscreen.

That was when my phone rang.

More specifically, I felt it buzzing in my pocket. We must have hit a sliver of reception. I dug the phone out and answered without looking. “Juliette?” I yelled.

“No, mate. Andy. You busy?”

I considered the crumpled front of the Land Cruiser, nose to tail with a speeding train, the wind whipping past as I hunched on the bonnet. The Ghan sheltered me from much of the wind’s noise, so I could just hear Andy over the chaos. “It’s not a great time,” I said. “If I’m honest.”

“I’ll be quick. It’s about Margaret.”

A car horn beeped, and I saw Lisa’s exasperated and incredulous expression, two hands thrown up in the universal gesture for What the hell?

“Who’s Margaret?”

“The robbery I’m working.”

“I thought you said her name was Poppy.”

“No. I said she sold poppies.”

“You didn’t. I told you that specifics are important here, Andy.”

Lisa beeped again, long and slow. I held up a finger. Her mouth formed a word that’s not fit for print. Turns out Andy’s actually quite important. I told you that’s a thing in these kinds of books: two disparate cases coming together.

“Jesus, Andy. You and I are working the same case.”

“Huh? You’ve got a case?”

“Couple of murders.”

Andy tsked in annoyance. “You’ve always got to have one better, don’t you?”

I ignored that. “Your robbery. You think it’s a junkie, right?”

“Yeah! That’s what I wanted to tell you. Break-ins are like a thing in the flower industry. Because some of the plants, you know, they have opium in them. Which is basically heroin. You can boil it out.”

“Poppies,” I said.

“No, her name’s not Poppy. I told you, it’s Margaret.”

“Poppies have opium in them, Andy.”

“Yes, that’s what I was saying. It’s this place’s specialty—” He dropped out, then came back on. “Weird, huh? What’s this got to do with your murders?”

“I think your thief is my killer.”

“Bit of a leap?”

I looked at the smoking deck, where I’d have to jump. “Tell me about it.”

“No way.” Andy’s enthusiasm accelerated from slow dawn to shouting. “Did I solve it for you? Did I?”

He hadn’t. I already had most of it worked out after my chat with Lisa, but I was in a generous mood. Maybe it was the adrenaline. And he had given me a great clue last night. So I said, “Yeah, Andy. You solved it.”

“Yes! That’s going on the websi—” He cut out.

Lisa beeped again, this time two sharp bursts—bip-bip—and I turned my attention back to the train in front. The noise of the wind was even less now. Lisa honked again, I assumed to hurry me up. The gap between the bonnet and the railing wobbled but stayed small. This was my chance.

I stood up, strode across the hood and jumped.

I overcooked it.

I had expected my jump to take a half second longer given the speed, but I crashed into the railing immediately. Stunned, I slid a little before I found purchase on the fencing, clutching it tightly while I caught my breath. The wind buffeted me less here; it was quieter. I actually laughed. A spasmodic response to surviving. Who’d have thought, when I started this journey, that I’d be hanging off the back of a speeding train? Now all I had to do was pull myself over the railing.

I didn’t dare look down, as I didn’t think I could stomach seeing the ground blur past, but I shot a look back at the Land Cruiser, expecting it to have peeled off in a cloud of dust, Lisa and the manuscript for Life, Death and Whiskey free.

The Land Cruiser was still behind the train. But that wasn’t the most surprising part. The most surprising thing was that Lisa was no longer in the driver’s seat. Neither was she clambering over the bonnet. She was standing beside the car, in the dirt.

Wait. Standing?

I looked down. The ground was there all right, but it wasn’t moving.

So much for clinging to a high-speed train. No wonder my jump had slammed me into the railing, that the wind had lessened. Lisa’s beeps had been telling me not to jump, that the train was coming to a stop. I must have made the jump when we were at walking pace. Now here I was, clinging on for dear life, and the Ghan was completely stationary.

Sheepishly, I clambered over onto the smoking deck. Lisa grabbed a satchel from the backseat and followed.

The back door opened, and Aaron stepped out. “What the hell are you two doing out here?” he asked.

To both my surprise and his, I hugged him. “Thank you. Thank you. You stopped for us.”

“What is that on the tracks?” He looked at the Land Cruiser, aghast. “What were you doing?”

“We were trying to get back on.”

“Back on?”

“That’s not why you stopped?” Lisa said. “You didn’t see Ernest go all Tom Cruise?”

“What in blazes are you talking about? I didn’t stop for you.” He took a second to properly absorb my appearance: bug-splattered cheeks; dirt-caked chin; wind-whipped hair. He took in the Land Cruiser again and his jaw dropped as if on a hinge.

“You had to stop?” I hoped someone else hadn’t died. “Why?”

“Cows on the tracks.” He shook his head in disbelief. “It’s not a bloody action movie.”

Chapter 31.5

I’m about to solve it.

Well, I’ve already solved it. I’m about to explain it to everyone. Like Royce tried to. Except I’ll get it right.

You know how these grand reveals tend to work. According to my writing schematic—which the events of the last few days have been keeping scarily close to—we’ve just crossed the “All is lost” moment (I almost died, twice!) and that means it’s time for it all to come out.

So I thought I’d pause here and give you, you know, one last chance to put your guesses in. This page is the last page where you get to brag about figuring it all out before I do. If you want to grab a pen and paper and have one more crack at Archie Bench, this is the spot for that too.

Also, I want you to know that, over the next couple of chapters, six people are going to use the phrase “I didn’t kill anybody.” Such repetition is not a fault of my creativity, it’s just what happened. I told my editor, who wondered if I could mix it up, that she could raise her concerns directly with the people who spoke those words, but I don’t think she was all that interested in hunting down everyone involved, let alone visiting a jail cell and a morgue.

Okay, back into it.

No more stops. Express to Adelaide.

– Henry McTavish: 337

– Alan Royce: 246

– Lisa Fulton: 149

– Wyatt Lloyd: 138

– S. F. Majors: 106

– Simone Morrison: 106

– Wolfgang: 94

– Aaron: 80

– Brooke: 71

– Jasper Murdoch: 63

– Harriet Murdoch: 53

– Douglas Parsons: 37

– Cynthia: 31

– Book Club/Veronica Blythe/Beehive: 29

– Archibald Bench: 26

– Erica Mathison: 12

– MongrelWrangler22: 8

– Troy Firth: 4

– Juliette: EXEMPT

– Noah Witrock: EXEMPT

– Detective Hatch: EXEMPT