Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Chapter 35

A ghostwriter. It was as simple as that.

It should have been so obvious that McTavish wasn’t writing his own books anymore. The timeline of his publications alone told enough of the story. His first book was a worldwide bestseller and his second was a flunk, which had made his confidence plummet. Coupled with his painful recovery from his accident—I could tell the third was squeezing out of him like a kidney stone, Simone had said—this had meant he’d had to steal from S. F. Majors just to get the third one done. But that wasn’t a trick he could use twice. Brooke had summed it up perfectly in the Chairman’s Carriage: Maybe now I think he’s a man who likes pleasure but doesn’t want to have to work for it. He’d needed another way to write the books.

“I thought you’d bought the Erica Mathison story,” Jasper whispered.

“As I told you last night, I knew you weren’t writing for yourself. You looked a bit worried that I’d figured it out at first, but at the time, of course, I thought you were Erica Mathison. You seemed relieved when I told you this, which I thought was a natural response after holding such a big secret for so long, but it was really because you thought your secret was still protected. After all, the scheme only has value if no one knows about it, as you told me. You were only too happy to confess to being Erica when I prompted you, not knowing Wolfgang was the real thing, to keep me off the scent. But, even if I was wrong about that, the clues are the same. The way you act is all developed from never being in the spotlight. And Harriet’s always trying to boost you up, make you recognize those achievements. That frustrated you—I assume the confidentiality clause in your contract is drum-tight, and so that was why you often tried to quiet her. You told me Harriet wants you to write under your own name, and maybe once that was your dream too. Your first novel came out in two thousand and nine, and the New York Times review compared you unfavorably to McTavish, whose books you were also writing. Despite the fact that Harriet had praised the fifth McTavish book, one you wrote, in two thousand and six, so highly that the blurb is still used on his covers. There’s that tattoo simile again—your voice is not something you can hide. You sound like you, and you can’t shake it, even though the world believes that you is someone else. But that review, that was what broke you. That was when you stopped pursuing your own voice and decided you were happy at the back of the room. You also did something no writer should ever do: you responded to the review.”

Simone physically winced. Jasper had told me this himself: Bad reviews are part of being a writer . . . I got one once, wrote to the reviewer.

“You told Harriet the truth in your response, didn’t you? That you thought her review was unfair because you were Henry McTavish. I’m assuming that confession led to your first meeting.”

Harriet nodded as Jasper explained. “I wanted to apologize. She thought it might be a great scoop, and I needed to beg her to keep it quiet. We got coffee. And, suddenly, such little things didn’t matter anymore.”

“She’s your biggest supporter,” I said. “Has been since she discovered you were the real McTavish, trying to give you the credit that even she, back in that review, hadn’t given you. So while you’re trying to shrug off the attention, Harriet could never resist the occasional flattery. Or a dig at the truth. She asked McTavish on the panel where he got his ideas. She told me you’d sold just as many books as McTavish. An easy enough statement to pass off as a general brag, but she was very specific: your sales were McTavish’s sales. And when I asked her if she was a fan of McTavish, Harriet said she was a big fan of his books. Not of the author. Of the books. Your books.”

Jasper turned to glare at Harriet. I remembered his anger when she’d told me these things, the friction between them. She wanted him to take center stage, but he was happy, or so he said, in the wings. Harriet squeezed his shoulder. Hard to tell whether it was in fear or apology.

“But the clues didn’t just come from Harriet. McTavish writes all his books on a typewriter, one single copy of the manuscript, supposedly to protect against spoilers, but really he doesn’t want the metadata of the true author to exist, evidence of the computer it’s written on. Supposedly he finished Life, Death and Whiskey on the train and hand-delivered it to Wyatt, but he doesn’t have a typewriter in his room. And, of course, there’re Jasper’s callused hands—from working on an old machine. There’s also the panel, back at the very start of this.”

I recalled McTavish slurring, slightly drunk, confusing The Night Comes with The Dawn Rises, brushing off not knowing which book came first: There are so many release dates and formats and countries to keep track of it’s easy to get muddled.

“McTavish didn’t even know what book he was supposed to be talking about on the panel. Not only that, but he didn’t even seem to properly understand that the series was ending.” I’d gotten this the wrong way round: I’d thought McTavish was upset at Wyatt for pushing him to keep the Morbund series going, but in reality he probably hadn’t even known Morbund had died in The Dawn Rises until that first panel. I remembered him glaring at Wyatt. “I assume he had a word with Wyatt about that little surprise. He’d been so hands-off he didn’t realize his cash cow was coming to an end. But, Jasper, that was your ultimatum to Wyatt. No more Morbund, until he published your own novel: Life, Death and Whiskey. And then when you gave it to Wyatt, he didn’t want it. Because Wyatt needed to smooth things over with McTavish, he went back on your deal: he needed a new Morbund from you. I heard you arguing.”

It’s in your contract. More Morbund, Wyatt had said. Why change it after all this time? Once I’d realized my error about Erica Mathison, I figured that it wasn’t McTavish in Wyatt’s room. After all, I hadn’t heard the distinctive thunk of McTavish’s cane. Just plain old, regular footsteps.

“Wyatt thought I was going to give him another Morbund novel,” Jasper said. “Even though The Dawn Rises was supposed to be the finale. The only way I could get him to agree to me killing off Morbund was by pitching it as a publicity stunt. Big sales for the final—so to speak—book, and even bigger sales for the comeback. I really hoped that if I gave it time, if I put something fantastic in front of him, he would come around. Or maybe I could convince him that if I just had a year off the Morbund books, I could do both.” He sucked his teeth. He was angry now. “He didn’t read more than a page.”

Harriet massaged Jasper’s shoulder. It fit with what I’d deduced. You promised me you’d bring him back, Wyatt had said. I know, I know. Archie Bench. Real fucking cute.

“Wyatt could have just gotten another ghostwriter though,” Hatch said.

“No one’s as good,” Harriet said. I agreed with her: the DNA of the Morbund books was as much Jasper’s as it was McTavish’s. He’d written most of them, after all. Wyatt would have seen him as irreplaceable.

I went on. “That’s why you put Archie Bench in the last book—that was your promise to Wyatt. To the sharp-eyed fans, including Brooke, who told me Archie Bench was the reason she wouldn’t have killed him. Archie Bench is an anagram for Reichenbach. As in Reichenbach Falls, the famous waterfall Sherlock Holmes died falling over. Only he didn’t stay dead: Conan Doyle brought him back, safe and well. Which is, of course, another reason I knew McTavish didn’t write it. I found a piece of paper in his notes, written on Ghan stationery, where he was trying to solve the anagram himself after the panel. Why would he need to solve his own puzzle if he was the one who’d come up with it?”

Brooke smiled at this.

“Jasper”—this was Hatch now—“how did you react when Wyatt declined your book?”

Jasper sighed. “I said I’d blow it all up. I’d out myself, McTavish. The whole thing.”

Don’t threaten me, I’d heard Wyatt say through the door.

“And there’s one final clue,” I said. I didn’t technically need this, I had more than enough confirmations of Jasper’s ghostwriting, but given Simone had gone to so much effort to set this up for me, I might as well give her the finale she desired. “Simone, you knew about all of this, didn’t you, all the way back when book three was finally delivered? You knew that Off the Rails was plagiarized, you would have been privy to Majors’s accusations, and negotiations with Jasper had begun for book four. You told me you wanted to work on real literature. That’s why you left that job.”

Simone, surprised that the conversation had turned from Jasper to her so quickly, stammered, “Y-you get a stink on you, it follows you around. I wanted out before the dominos fell.”

“But they didn’t, and you watched Wyatt and McTavish grow rich off a secret you held. You wanted your slice, which meant convincing McTavish to sign with your agency, so you tried a little bit of old-fashioned blackmail. You told me that the way to get through to McTavish was by speaking to him in codes and riddles, and you did exactly that.”

That was what she’d told me: To get his attention, to impress him, you have to use his own tricks. He loves codes and riddles and wordplay and all that Golden Age stuff.

“Just before we got on the train, you logged in to his Goodreads social media profile, the one Wyatt had always begged him to use—because although Goodreads wasn’t around when you worked for him, he only ever used the one password, even though you told me you didn’t remember it—and left five individual reviews as Henry McTavish.”

Simone’s objection doused itself before it got out of her mouth.

“McTavish was confused when Wolfgang suggested he was an ally in disliking my writing, even though he’d supposedly just given me one star. He’d never used the platform before, and these were his only reviews. That was why you wouldn’t talk to Wyatt about taking it down. Because it was a code. A threat for McTavish.”

I’d seen it in Royce’s notebook, almost perfectly stacked, and I felt a fool for not figuring this part out sooner.

Ernest: * Ghastly

Wolfgang: ** Heavenly

S. F. Majors: *** Overblown

Me: **** Splendid

Trollop: ***** Tremendous

“You were spelling a five-letter word in code. That’s why Wolfgang’s two-star review is incongruous with the word heavenly, and Majors’s Overblown is a bit harsh for three stars. The star rating dictates the letter placement in the code word. Using the first, capitalized, letters of the reviews in order, it reads GHOST.”

Up by the bar, Aaron took a long swig of the vodka straight from the bottle. Cryptology is not for everyone.

“Of course, McTavish doesn’t actually use his Goodreads, but you knew Wyatt would tell him. And McTavish was savvy enough to piece it together, given his skill at codes. And because it couldn’t have been Wyatt, he’d have suspected you were the most likely to log in to his accounts. So you made your pitch. He must have invited you to his carriage for privacy—I smelled your blueberry vapor in his room. But the threat of exposure wasn’t enough to persuade McTavish to sign with you. All you got was a red face and, from Wyatt, a consolation pen. But then he died, and you figured I might write about it. You told me that the more complex, the more cryptic clues there were, the better it would sell. You tried to make me think about the reviews too, drawing my attention to them at the dinner—five stars for effort. You were pointing to Jasper as the killer all along. If I figured it out, you won in two ways: I’d have a better shot at another bestselling book, and I’d take Wyatt down a peg in the telling. Too bad he died before he could see his name in print. Right on schedule, it occurs to me.”

Simone folded her arms. “Maybe some of that’s true. But I’m not killing people so you can write your stupid book, Ernest. And I only gave you one star because I thought you could take it. I didn’t realize you’d be so fragile.”

“You don’t know me very well, do you?” I said.

“Doesn’t mean I hurt people.” She was the last of the group to say “I didn’t kill anybody.” She marched over to the bar and snatched Aaron’s vodka from him, swigged it and put it on the counter. “Can you just arrest Jasper already?” she appealed to Hatch.

Hatch took a step toward Jasper, having heard enough to convince him. Jasper shuffled backward, but he was hemmed in by the bar itself. He had nowhere to go. Harriet took his hand in sympathy.

“The problem is,” I continued, “Jasper did agree to a deal with Wyatt. Wyatt doubled his ghostwriting advance so that Life, Death and Whiskey could be McTavish’s posthumous novel. If he has motive to kill McTavish, he doesn’t for Wyatt. Jasper didn’t do this.”

Before I could say it aloud, the murderer revealed themselves. If I’m honest, it was sort of disrespectful: they spoiled my big moment. The detective is supposed to announce the solution while everyone slowly turns to look at the culprit. But by the time she’d grabbed the vodka bottle from the bar, smashed it and held its ragged mouth at Simone’s throat, all eyes were already on Harriet Murdoch.

Chapter 36

“Harriet?” Jasper said to me, confused. Then turned to her. “Harriet?” As in, Is this really you? And then back to me for a final, “Seriously. Harriet?” His incredulous chanting of his wife’s name did my tally count a real favor.

Harriet had Simone in strength, age and size. She’d spun her into a tight grip, forearm clutched against Simone’s chest. The rest of us, Jasper included, backed away. Though several of us could have taken her one-on-one, the jagged shards of the bottle dimpling Simone’s neck held us at bay.

“I’m sorry, Jasper,” I said.

“Tell them it’s not true,” he begged her. “Tell them. Or that you didn’t mean it. It was an accident. Please.”

Harriet didn’t say anything. A drop of red beaded on the broken glass, trickled down the inside of the bottle. Simone was bug-eyed. Her hands were fluttering at her sides: Stay back. Hatch made a pantomime show of putting his Taser away in the hope Harriet might relax.

“It was no accident. Harriet boarded this train with a plan and a bag full of stolen flowers and was ready to kill with them. But, if I’m honest, I think she was still working up the courage when she got on the train.”

“Sorry, the murder weapon is flowers?” Hatch said.

“Opium poppies can be used to make heroin. You can make a tea with them. They’re grown in Tasmania for pharmaceutical purposes—you can’t buy these kind of flowers in a shop. Addicts often try to steal them to make their own drugs. Of course, you know all this, don’t you, Harriet? What you don’t know is that the person whose poppy farm you stole from was a quaint old lady named Margaret with a penchant for justice and terrible taste in low-budget detectives.”

“Tasmania?” Jasper said, staring at his wife like she was an abstract painting.

“I knew you’d started your trip there,” I said. “You said you’d taken the chance to drive Australia top to bottom while you finished Life, Death and Whiskey. And you accidentally gave Wyatt seasickness pills instead of hay fever tablets. The only way to drive Australia truly top to bottom is to put your car on the ferry across the Bass Strait from Tasmania to the mainland: hence the pills. Wyatt, who had the room next to you, got terrible hay fever on that first day. That’s because your room, your clothes, were coated with pollen from the poppies Harriet had stuffed in her bag. I saw the petals in the corridor too, but I assumed it was some romantic flourish.”

Harriet took a step backward, toward the restaurant carriage. Simone stumbled with the movement, and the jagged edge of the glass drew a longer line of red across her neck.

“I did it for you, Jasper,” Harriet said. “That stupid review I wrote, I saw what it did to you. It snuffed out your ambitions for anything more, made you happy in the shadows of someone else’s career. You know how that makes me feel? Knowing I led you to believe that you were nothing more than another man’s name? I’m sick of seeing my words—peerless . . . ,” she seethed, “unbeatable—on every fucking cover. Those words should have been yours. They are yours. No. I wanted to put it right. You should have your own name. Your own success. Your own legacy.”

“And McTavish was in the way of all of that, wasn’t he?” I said. “Because even though Jasper had tried to finish the series, killing Morbund off, Wyatt was never going to let him out of it. Wyatt didn’t want Life, Death and Whiskey; why accept a Jasper Murdoch novel when he could be getting more McTavishes? And so McTavish had to go to clear Jasper’s way. But that still wasn’t the final straw, was it?”

Harriet shook her head.

“Like I said, you didn’t know if you could go through with it. But the tipping point, the thing that changed you from hypothetical to murderous, is so simple. It’s a beer coaster.”

I remembered Jasper approaching McTavish, introducing himself. McTavish had signed the beer coaster To Jasper Murdoch. Harriet had read it aloud. Wow. That’s a keeper.

“He didn’t even know your name!” Harriet yelled. She maneuvered, forcing Simone to fall in step with her, into the small corridor beside the bar, toward the door to the next carriage.

Jasper, Hatch and I kept gentle pace, one step forward for each of her steps back.

“The things you’ve done for him. The money you’ve made him. And he thinks you’re some fanboy who wants an autograph? An autograph?”

I kept going. “You brewed the opium tea in the little kitchenette at the end of the carriage. That’s why the kettle was in the bin, because you didn’t want anyone else on the train accidentally dosing themselves. You mixed the tea in with a bottle of whiskey—top-shelf stuff, the kind that McTavish wouldn’t be able to resist—and left it in front of his door so he’d see it in the morning, adding an anonymous card: From an admirer. McTavish thought it was from Brooke, whom he’d propositioned the night before, not realizing she was his daughter. That’s why he offered to share it with her that morning, just before he died; he assumed she’d know what he was talking about.”

I’d heard him say to her: It’s a mighty fine drop to drink alone. “Now, you didn’t mean for his murder to be so dramatic. You thought he might have a nightcap, die in his sleep. Or, even better, drink it after the journey, when you wouldn’t even be close to him. Unfortunately, McTavish is an alcoholic. He got stuck in straightaway, filling his flask with it.”

The bottle pressed deeper into Simone’s neck.

“Harry, please—” Jasper said.

“Easy, Harriet,” I said. I hardly had to explain her own crimes to her, but it seemed my talking was distracting her from any throat-slitting, so I kept going. “The thing is, you still might have gotten away with it. It was a good plan, after all. The only problem was McTavish’s death had the opposite effect to the one you wanted.

“This was supposed to free Jasper. But suddenly Life, Death and Whiskey—the book Wyatt hadn’t wanted while McTavish was alive—was valuable. You hadn’t unshackled Jasper at all, you’d clamped another chain on him. Because, whether he’s writing as himself or not, just like your New York Times review said, Jasper writes like McTavish. And so Wyatt knows he can pass Life, Death and Whiskey off as McTavish, so he doubles what he’s been paying previously for the Morbund books, so he can buy this, now posthumous, novel. A literary McTavish.” I knew now when I’d seen him on the phone at Alice Springs, he’d been rustling up the approval for enough money to do the deal. “And Jasper is more than happy with the money, so he gladly accepts. He just wants his work out there, no matter whose name is on the cover. You were arguing about him taking the deal at Simpsons Gap.

“You’re furious. You did all this so Jasper could make it on his own. You go to talk to Wyatt that night. I don’t know exactly how that conversation went, but I think I know how it ended. He tells you that he owns Jasper and there’s nothing you can do about it. To make his point, he takes out his Gemini pen and writes with a flourish on the cover page, on Jasper’s opus: by Henry McTavish. The only handwritten words on the whole typescript. It was a final insult that you couldn’t take. You grabbed the pen out of his hand and—”

“You’re free,” Harriet said, interrupting me. Her back was against the carriage door. She had eyes only for Jasper. Love, Lisa had said, would be the motive. Love indeed. “Your whole career everyone’s looked at you a certain way. You deserve so much more. They deserve everything they got. I love you so much. It was for you.”

Jasper was crying. “This wasn’t for me, Harry. Don’t say that.”

“I love you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I love you.” She faltered. I’ve looked enough killers in the eyes to know this moment. Their eyes almost physically unglaze. It’s like waking up from a coma. “Jasper? I love you.”

“Harriet . . . I . . . I . . .” Jasper could barely get the words out. “I don’t even recognize you.”

The movement was minuscule, but I saw the tendons in Harriet’s arm flex and knew she was about to use the bottle. I lunged forward. Harriet saw me move and pushed Simone at me, which in the tiny corridor was like a ten-pin bowling strike: everyone went down. Harriet ducked through the door between carriages.

We untangled our limbs. Hatch was groaning and holding his wrist. Simone seemed okay; the blood on her neck smeared away and did not replenish. She pushed me back. “I’m fine,” she growled. “Stop her.”

I dashed into the restaurant carriage, Jasper close behind me. It was empty.

“Where the hell is she going to go?” Jasper said.

The sound of breaking glass came from the next carriage, accompanied by the howl of wind rushing into the train. We burst in to see leaves fluttering in the air, glass on the carpet under the closest window. I stuck my head out and saw Harriet’s foot disappearing over the rim. She’d scaled the ladder that was on the outside of each carriage. I looked back at Jasper and pointed to the roof. The wind was a tornado in our ears.

Hatch staggered through the door behind us, wincing as he cradled his wrist. He tapped me on the shoulder, handed me his Taser. He wouldn’t be able to get up the ladder. I nodded, pointed to the end of the carriage, where I’d remembered the sign: To Stop Train Pull Handle Down.

I’d already far surpassed my desired number of moving vehicles to stand on top of—the ideal number being, of course, zero—but, much to both my personal disappointment and the disappointment of anyone making a movie out of this book on a tight budget, for the second time that day I pulled myself out of a window.

I climbed the ladder quickly, adrenaline masking the pain in my still bloodied fingertips. On top, I could barely open my eyes against the wind. Harriet was a blur, even though she was only meters from me, hunched over like a cat. The wind rocked me backward, and my shoes slid on the corrugated roof. That’s why Harriet was crouching: I was catching too much of the wind. I dropped to my belly and slid forward.

I felt a tap on my ankle and looked behind me: Jasper had made it up the ladder. I gripped the Taser tightly, pressing it into the roof as I dragged myself forward. The train didn’t seem to have slowed at all. How long does it take to pull a lever? Surely Aaron had been on the radio to the drivers, too. But fourteen hundred tons doesn’t stop on a dime, I figured.

Suddenly, something hit me in the wrist. I saw enough through the squinty blur of wind to make out a shoe, and the Taser went skittering across the roof. I’d love to tell you it teetered on the edge, perilously balanced, so a stretched-out hand could grab it at the perfect moment, but while thrillers often contain fight scenes that are laden with luck, this book has one thing most don’t: physics. The Taser wobbled and fell over the side.

I clutched the air in front of me, hoping to grab Harriet. My eyes were getting used to the wind, and her blur had started to take shape. She looked like she’d turned around. In fact, I could see her well enough to watch as she raised the broken bottle and brought it down firmly into my shoulder.

The bleeding was immediate, and serious. It felt like a bucket of water had been tossed over my back. I tried to grab her but realized I couldn’t move my right arm. I felt my skin pucker as she pulled the bottle out. Saw her clamber away. So much for a big fight scene. I was getting light-headed. All I could do was lie flat and hope the wind didn’t blow me off the train before we came to a stop.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, then hot breath on my ear. Jasper, leaning close.

“Use my name,” he said. “My real name.”

Then he was moving ahead of me. He widened his arms as he approached Harriet, and she dropped the bottle. I couldn’t tell what he was saying to her. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. And then Jasper made his move.

He hugged her.

It was a tight embrace, tight enough that their hearts would beat against each other’s chests. Like a soldier home from war. Harriet nuzzled her face into Jasper’s shoulder. Maybe, for a second, they forgot everything around them: the wind, the blood, the death, the pain. They just held each other.

Then Jasper rolled them both over the side.