Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Chapter 32

Now it was my turn to bash on the doors, rousing the writers and several of the guests. Mysteries tend to have a lot of waiting around for everyone except the detective, and everyone was in various states of lazing, counting the minutes to Adelaide. Majors was listening to a podcast. I had to wake Royce. Jasper and Harriet were playing Travel Scrabble. Douglas was not in his room. Wolfgang was writing in a Moleskine notebook and was skeptical when I asked him to meet us in the bar, muttering that he’d seen this already on this trip. Simone was marking up a contract. She scanned my bloodied, dirt-caked self and then patted me on the shoulder and said, “Perilous third act, I see.”

Brooke flung her arms around her mother, before seeing me and dropping them, concocting some stammering half story about how they were friends and she’d been waiting in the room.

“Jig’s up,” Lisa said, and hugged her back. “He knows. It’s okay.”

Brooke eyed me warily, untrusting.

“I solved Archie Bench,” I said, as a peace offering.

“Well, aren’t you clever,” Brooke said, taking off toward the bar. “This will be fun.”

Everyone was either curious or bored enough to follow me. Even Aaron had given up objecting. The only guests I didn’t retrieve were the three women in the Erica Mathison book club, Veronica Blythe and her two friends. Not because they weren’t important—they are—but because I didn’t need them there in person.

Inside the bar carriage, Cynthia was wiping down the coffee machine, and Detective Hatch was, conveniently, interviewing Douglas. Hatch stood as we all entered. “Hold it!” His protesting was futile against our advance into the room. “I am still conducting interviews. I require you all to stay in your rooms.”

“Haven’t you heard?” I said. “This is a writers’ festival. We’ve actually got one last speaking event. I’m announcing my new book. It’s called Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect.”

Simone gave a little fairy clap of excitement.

“The festival is canceled,” Hatch interrupted, indignant. “No more panels.”

“I’m the festival’s director,” Majors said firmly. “And I say we have another session planned. Right now. Festival’s back on.”

Hatch flopped back into his chair. Waved a hand as if to say, Get on with it.

“Actually,” I said, “don’t kick back too quickly. I am going to need your help a little.”

Hatch sighed. “What?”

“Do you have a gun?”

“No. Taser.”

“Okay. How many pairs of handcuffs do you have?” I pointed to his backpack.

“Two.”

“That’ll have to do.” I thought for a second. “First things first, I need you to arrest Alan Royce.”

The Seven Deductions of Ernest Cunningham

Chapter 33

“I didn’t kill anybody!” Royce protested.

“I’m not cuffing anyone simply because you say so,” Hatch said.

“I didn’t say arrest him for murder,” I said. “I think it’s got a technical name. Obstruction of justice? Evidence tampering?” I addressed everyone now. “Henry McTavish committed a vile crime, and Wyatt Lloyd and Alan Royce helped him cover it up.”

The color vanished from Royce’s cheeks. People were staring at him now, trying to figure out what he’d done. S. F. Majors looked at the floor. I turned to Lisa. I didn’t want this to be any more painful for the Fultons than it needed to be, but they deserved justice for what Royce had done to them, and that meant laying out all the facts. “May I?”

Lisa gave a stiff nod. Brooke held her arm tightly.

“Edinburgh, two thousand and three. McTavish and Lisa did not, as has been attested, have a fling. He raped her.” The silence in the room was thick. “It was your word against his, Lisa. You didn’t stand a chance against the money and power behind McTavish, namely Wyatt. But you had forensics. McTavish’s DNA under your fingernails was supposed to be your proof that you’d tried to fight him off. Until there was a stuff-up, a simple admin error, which meant the evidence was inadmissible. With no one willing to be a witness for you, Wyatt offered you a deal. Some money to stay quiet. Take the check and sweep it under the rug. You accepted because not only did McTavish force himself on you, he fathered your child. Brooke is Henry McTavish’s daughter.”

I’m pleased to report there was a little gasp at this.

“Though you’d never met him, Brooke, you idolized your father through his books. You couldn’t wait to meet him. You didn’t really believe your mother when she tried to warn you away from Henry. And then you got here, and he was everything Lisa had told you he was. It broke your heart.”

“That sounds like much more motive to commit murder than I have,” Royce exclaimed. “Her father, and then the man who helped him get away with it.” He thumbed at his chest. “Inn-oh-cent!”

“I didn’t kill anybody,” Brooke said.

“You have motive, of course,” I replied. “Everyone here does. But if you were the murderer, for those reasons at least, I’d suggest that Royce would probably have been killed by now too.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No, Royce. I’m saying that if someone is killing off people involved in covering up the rape of Lisa Fulton, you’d be a very likely target.”

He squeaked something that sounded like don’t but I was low on pity.

“You were never a full-fledged pathologist, not like it says on your bio. You were an intern in a lab. This was in Edinburgh, right?”

Royce hadn’t told me this directly, but he had bragged that he’d gone to the same university as Arthur Conan Doyle, which is, indeed, the University of Edinburgh. So it wasn’t too much of a leap to guess his internship had been in the same city. “But you had dreams of being a writer. Your work sat unread on publishers’ desks, even though you submitted it four times to Gemini. Until Wyatt picked it up. So along Wyatt comes one day, offering you a book deal that most writers would dream of. And he just wants a little favor. Swap the labels on a couple of vials. That was the deal you struck, wasn’t it? You cover this up for Wyatt, and he publishes you as the next hot new thing. It makes sense: why else would Gemini have changed their mind after four rejections? Your job description would have been in your bio. Wyatt must not have believed his luck. And the timelines work: your first book published in two thousand and four. But now your sales are dropping, Wyatt was losing interest, and you decided a blurb from Henry would fix it. You were humiliated that Henry had endorsed Lisa over you. You told me yourself that McTavish owed you.”

Snot ran out Royce’s nose. I’m not going to bother with his dialogue, but I’ll tell you that blubbering and groveling are suitable descriptions. Between mucus bubbles, he admitted that everything I’d deduced was true. Hatch leaned forward with interest.

Harriet spoke up. “So that’s three people in a secret cover-up, and two of them are dead? And yet Alan isn’t the killer?”

“His big accusation was certainly a distraction,” Wolfgang said. “To do that whole song and dance accusing someone who he knew was actually dead. It would be a way to take the heat off.”

“Thank you both. But Royce didn’t do it. Mainly because he’s a coward. He sides with and hides behind others. This is not a bloke who carries the knife. But destroying a victim’s chance at justice, just for a book deal, that seems pretty cowardly to me.” I looked at Hatch. “You can cuff him now, if you like.”

Hatch held up the cuffs to Royce. “I don’t have jurisdiction for an international crime that may or may not have happened. But it will probably help your cause later if you cooperate now.”

Royce nodded. His arm was al dente as Hatch cuffed him to the chair’s armrest, sitting like it was boneless. He looked resigned to what he knew was coming. I’d say it was a fall from grace, but grace was probably a few stories too many above Royce for him to have a proper splat. The next thing he’d write would be an apology on Twitter, which is a format reserved for the sincerest of apologies.

“Despite his conclusion being wrong, Royce actually laid out some reasonable motives for the rest of you,” I continued. “But, Lisa, this was why he refused to consider you a suspect in his summation.” I recalled her trying to bait him into it: Tell them why I’m a suspect, Alan. “He was discounting a completely viable path of inquiry because he knew that if he unpacked your motive, his involvement could be exposed.”

Majors crossed the room, tears in her eyes, and hugged Lisa.

Hatch cleared his throat. “Does it usually take this long?”

All the crime writers in the room said simultaneously: “Yes.”

“I have to go through everyone’s motives and alibis publicly,” I said. “It’s basically a requirement of the genre.” I lowered my voice in a conspiratorial whisper. “And my literary agent is here, and given all she’s done—behind the scenes, so to speak—to bring this book to life, I think she’ll want a proper ending. She’ll want me to really milk it.”

Simone squirmed in her seat. I enjoyed that too much to elaborate just yet, so I turned instead to S. F. Majors.

“One thing Royce had right was your motive. That same night in Edinburgh, you told McTavish your idea for a novel. A year later, his new book Off the Rails was published and it had the exact same plot. And that boiled in you. Because not only was it your idea, it was your story. Wasn’t it?”

Majors was chewing her lip. She shot a glance at someone else. I’ll get to who in a moment.

“You attended a regional primary school, didn’t you? It’s in your bio. You used to reread the only three books in your school library, which speaks of a very small school to me. You know Alice Springs—you recommended the best bakery to get a vanilla slice. You grew up around here.”

Majors nodded.

“That school bus that was hit by the Ghan, I am guessing that was from your school. I don’t think you survived the crash though—no one could have. I think you missed it entirely.”

“I was sick,” Majors said. “Any other day my parents would have bundled me up with tissues and painkillers and sent me off, but I never liked sports on Wednesdays, and so I hammed it up. I could’ve gone.” Her voice quivered, and I felt a wave of empathy: the why me I’d struggled with so much myself. “The girl . . . in my story, if that’s where you’re going with this . . . her name was Anna. She was my best friend. If you care to know.”

I knew it was like pushing a rotten tooth with your tongue to her, so I turned my attention to Douglas. “Let’s talk about how the two of you met. Your partner, Noah, was a teacher at the school, and he died that day in the crash. You told me that the driver of the bus, Troy Firth, had been inappropriate with a student. Anna, as we’ve just learned. Noah had convinced Anna to come forward. To stop that from happening, Troy parked on the tracks and locked all the doors.”

“He killed five people,” Douglas said. “Four kids.”

“The accident makes local news, it’s a tragedy, but nothing more. Normally such a story would fade into the past, but not here. Because a version of the story gets retold and lives on in one of the most popular crime novelists in the world’s third book. But Off the Rails is not just a retelling of the accident, it’s the real story—someone staging a murder as a rail accident—a story which only a few people knew. A victim’s best friend”—I nodded to Majors—“and her teacher’s partner. But there’s one crucial difference: in the book, the murderer gets away. If you believe it is a true story, you might believe something crazy. You might believe that Off the Rails has a hidden meaning: that Troy Firth is still alive.”

All the women in the room sized up the men: Wolfgang, Royce, Jasper, Douglas. Even Aaron didn’t escape the scrutiny.

“That’s where you come in, Douglas. You brought a gun on this train.” This drew a murmur. “Don’t worry, Hatch. The gun’s in a trash can at Alice Springs. Douglas, you asked me a question about revenge during our first panel. You wanted to know what it felt like to take a life. You set foot on this train ready to kill someone.”

“I’m not—”

“I know you’re not Troy Firth. But you were looking for him.”

I let that sink in.

Simone gasped. “Troy Firth is Henry McTavish. His injury.”

“Sorry to be the editor,” Wolfgang said. “But is that plausible? Majors knows the man who molested and murdered her best friend is walking around still alive, and she doesn’t turn him in to the cops?”

“It’s not plausible at all,” I agreed. “The timing’s out, for one thing. That could be a plot point straight out of any one of our books, but it’s not real life. The problem is: it’s exactly what Douglas believed. He thought Off the Rails was the true story of how Henry McTavish got away with multiple murders. He convinced himself McTavish was Firth, and that Off the Rails was a confession. Because there was just enough truth in the book to make it seem convincing, after all. But it was truth that McTavish stole, not knowing the consequences, from Majors’s story.”

Majors cleared her throat. “The idea for the book came about because I thought I saw a man that looked like an older Troy Firth, many years later. That’s it. A fleeting glimpse that triggers a random memory. That’s all we hunt for, Hatch, if you don’t understand. Writing is merely piling up the sticks and the grass and then hoping a tiny flicker sets it all aflame. Like all the best ideas, it just snapped into focus as a story. What if I’d just seen Troy Firth? That’s what I told Henry in two thousand and three. My idea. But it had details of Anna’s story. Real details. Enough to convince Douglas that it was really true. But then he approaches me at dinner after the first panel, where McTavish and I argued over Off the Rails, and he thinks I also suspect what he does. I tell him he’s mad, that my grievance with McTavish lies elsewhere, and that the plot is fiction.” I remembered them whispering, excluding Royce from their conversation. “And then I let him have it at the Telegraph Station the next night. Troy Firth was a terrible man, but he’s been dead a long time. Douglas let his desire for vengeance blur fiction with what he wanted to be the reality.”

I focused on Douglas. “That’s why you thanked me and tossed the gun after McTavish had died—you had come here to kill him, and you thought I’d just done it for you. Majors was yelling at you at the Telegraph Station because she thought you’d acted on your suspicions and killed him. Of course, you were dead wrong. Henry McTavish is Henry McTavish: where in his biography would he find time to drive school buses in Australia? And Troy Firth died in the crash. McTavish got his injuries in a hit-and-run. That’s documented. But the fact that you came here believing otherwise, and willing to kill for it—well, that’s true.”

“I didn’t kill anybody,” Douglas said, looking around the room. “Just like I told you. I picked the gun up in Darwin with revenge in my heart, sure. But I changed my mind, after what you said. About the toll it takes. I skipped the bushwalk to scatter Noah’s ashes, and I let it go.”

“Legally speaking, I didn’t kill anybody either, remember,” I said. I believed that Douglas’s intent and actions were separate. Of course, forgiveness was easier when McTavish was already dead, but Douglas had had plenty of opportunities to shoot him on the first day and hadn’t. Maybe Majors had put just enough doubt in his mind, and I’d helped him realize that true justice isn’t simply revenge. Either way, he’d come to his senses and binned the revolver at Alice Springs station. “At the formal dinner, you looked like you’d been set free. I didn’t understand at the time, but I do now.”

“You’ve solved a lot of half crimes,” Hatch said, folding his arms. “But I was promised a murderer.”

“Right. Before I start this next part, I just want you all to remember the murder weapon used on Wyatt.”

“A pen,” Hatch said.

“Not just any pen,” I corrected him. “A Gemini Publishing pen. A gift to all of Wyatt’s authors, which extends to, as I understand it: Royce, McTavish, probably Jasper, and Lisa, for her first book. Plus Simone, to whom Wyatt gave a pen yesterday.” I had recalled Wyatt’s snarky words at dinner: She didn’t come away entirely empty-handed. I gave her a consolation prize. Not that she’ll be signing anyone with it. Wyatt wouldn’t have been able to resist the opportunity to patronize Simone, handing her a pen with a Better luck next time frown. “And, of course, Wolfgang.”

“Wolfgang is published by HarperCollins, actually,” Simone said.

“Wolfgang.” I turned to him. “Just how interactive is your art project?”

Chapter 34

Wolfgang brought his hands together in a slow, droll clap. “You think you’re very clever, don’t you?” He stopped clapping and spread his hands. “The floor is yours. Entertain us.”

I didn’t hesitate: I’d been looking forward to this part. “Ever since I saw the name of your project, The Death of Literature, I knew it had to encompass some kind of humiliation of the establishment. Because you believe that your works are art, and anything else is . . . What did you call a writer like me?” I did air quotes as I reminded Wolfgang of his words on the panel. “Ah, yes. Pulp. And who’s the very embodiment of pulp fiction at the moment? Well, one might say the Scottish crime sensation Henry McTavish. Another might say Wyatt Lloyd himself, specializing in publishing commercial fiction, including not only McTavish but also Erica Mathison.”

Wolfgang yawned. “Royce tried this on already—you’re going to need a little more than that.”

“Clearly your project was designed to humiliate Wyatt. You couldn’t resist gloating over dinner on the first night, and Wyatt was mortified by what you’d told him. He yelled at you that what you were doing would ruin him. Then he tried to buy you out. I assume you declined?”

“The price of preserving literature isn’t one that can be paid by men like him.”

“Exactly. So the question becomes: what could you possibly have done that would ruin Wyatt Lloyd? The answer is simple. You’ve invited three people on this train journey: two art curators and a book reviewer. All three of them are reading The Eleven Orgasms of Deborah Winstock by Erica Mathison. All three of them have fresh copies, bought in a bookshop in Darwin. One copy is newly signed, from a reclusive author who never does appearances. All three of them, respected intelligent women, think it’s absolute genius. Why? Because Erica Mathison is your art project.”

If you’re playing along at home, you’ll know Wolfgang was at 94 mentions, and Erica was on 12. Added together as per my rules for aliases, that puts him on a certain magic number.

“Oh, you’re much better than Alan,” Wolfgang said with a smirk.

“That’s why you have a Gemini pen,” I said.

Wolfgang made a great act of pulling off an invisible mask from his chin to his forehead. His eyes sparked. “You’re looking at Erica Mathison. Wyatt didn’t know it was me. I set it up through a company, with an international account and a PO box for him to send contracts or whatever.”

“Or a pen.”

“Indeed. My plan was to sell him the most basic, abjectly dreadfully written pulp”—his wet lips popped with disgust on the P—“and he lapped it up. Like a dog. Then he made it into one of the year’s biggest bestsellers. Proving my point: true art is undervalued, and commercial art can be concocted.”

“You didn’t exactly mind the commercial aspect, though, did you? Simone told me your sales are likely miserable. And yet you pulled up to Berrimah in a two-hundred-thousand-dollar Jaguar. You’re not exactly Robin Hood.”

“The spoils are part of the point,” he said, sneering. “It’s irony. I can explain it to you if you like.”

“You can justify it however you want. For the record, I think you’re a hypocrite. But you are a man of convictions, and the point of the experiment was always to unveil it. That was what you were telling Wyatt over dinner: who you really were. You were also telling him that you were going public. That’s why you invited these influential tastemakers, people whose opinions you respected. You let them in on the joke, signed their books, basked in their adulation of your genius.” The comments that had so appalled Simone, from the supposedly respected professionals over such a trashy novel—genius . . . true vision . . . a revelation—now made sense.

I paused, glanced around the room, then turned back to Wolfgang. “But none of that’s quite ruinous—that’s what I couldn’t understand. Your thesis could be to set out to prove that anyone can write a bestseller. Sure. Mario Puzo reportedly did that with The Godfather. Or maybe you wanted to highlight the financial excess that some books, some writers, receive. But at the end of the day, none of that matters. Millions of people are still going to read Erica Mathison. Wyatt might be embarrassed, but Gemini’s profits must be through the roof. The Death of Literature demanded something more dramatic.”

Erica Mathison was supposed to be a huge middle finger to the establishment; she was supposed to take them down a peg. Veronica Blythe had said this herself to Simone: It’s people like you who could learn a lot from this book. I was pacing now, working my way into my deductions. Aaron had slowly moved to the back of the crowd. He’d finally cracked his professional veneer, pulling up a stool at the bar and unscrewing the cap from a bottle of vodka.

“Erica Mathison isn’t real. But here’s the kicker: neither are the books she wrote.”

At this, Wolfgang’s smugness dropped for the first time. He knew I had him all figured out.

“It was never as simple as writing a book that you consider beneath you. You created The Eleven Orgasms of Deborah Winstock using a computer program. Artificial intelligence wrote it for you. That’s why you were reading a textbook on AI coding the other morning, The Price of Intelligence. AI is open source now, everyone can use it. Hell, my uncle used ChatGPT to write his website. Why not use AI to write a book? You said yourself on that panel that in fifty years books like mine will be written by machines. And that”—I jabbed a finger at him—“is dramatic enough to prove your point. Wyatt Lloyd’s new bestseller was written by a computer. He’d be livid. It’s almost worth killing for.”

“You’d be surprised how easy it was,” Wolfgang said. “I just punched in what I needed to happen in each chapter. The algorithm spat it back out. It took me all of a single day. The writing wasn’t perfect, but Wyatt’s team cleaned it up in edits. He was so titillated by this debased concoction, his judgment so blurred by dollar signs, that he ignored all the red flags. He didn’t even care we didn’t meet. Voilà. That was the point of the whole thing. Commercial fiction is a recipe. True art can only be made”—he pointed at his forehead—“here.”

“If I understand correctly,” Hatch interrupted, now leaning forward like an overeager schoolchild, no longer objecting but fully invested, “this gives Wyatt motive to kill Wolfgang. Not the other way around.”

“Exactly,” Wolfgang said. “Not only that, but I wanted everyone to know. That’s why I invited my guests. It was going to be in the papers as soon as we hit Adelaide. I told Wyatt to his face. This was always a secret I intended to tell. I didn’t kill anybody”—that was, if you’re counting, the fifth of six times this phrase will be used—“to cover it up.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I did wonder if the money might have been enough to make you change your mind. Now that you’d enjoyed the financial success that had eluded your career so far, would you kill to keep it? But I don’t think you would. And you gave me the biggest clue of all to the real killer.”

“At your service,” Wolfgang said dryly.

“No joke. You actually liked someone’s writing.”

Wolfgang grunted, perhaps offended by the accusation of positivity.

“I’m talking about Life, Death and Whiskey. When you flicked through it in Wyatt’s cabin, you thought McTavish’s writing had improved. Right?”

“A little,” Wolfgang scoffed.

“Yes. Literally. You thought Life, Death and Whiskey had the smallest of improvements. You thought his first book, the only one you’ve read, was bloody awful. Littered with Oxford commas, you told me. You also told me writing is like a tattoo. No one can shake their little tics. An Oxford comma is one of McTavish’s habits. The answer’s been looking us straight in the face.”

Given we were down to discussing literary technique, most of the writers in the room had figured it out by now. Hatch still needed a little more explanation, so I went on.

“It’s in the bloody title! Life, Death and Whiskey omits the Oxford comma.”

I’d like to apologize quickly. I’m about to break one of the fundamental rules here. Turns out there are ghosts in this book after all.

“Henry McTavish wasn’t writing his own books anymore,” I said. “Jasper Murdoch was.”