Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Chapter 12

We were all swiftly banished to our cabins while the staff organized the cleanup. It sounds heartless to put it like that, but no matter how dramatic a dead body may be, there is always a moment where it just comes down to someone getting out a bucket and mop.

Besides, the Ghan was populated with twilight-years tourists: it can’t have been the first dead body the staff had faced. And a hirsute man who punished his organs with lashings from a silver flask wasn’t an unlikely candidate for an early demise. As such, while the guests oscillated between shivering shock and tear-streaked panic (the former being Majors, the latter being Brooke), the staff were remarkably calm. No one even mentioned stopping the train as an option. Of course, we were also in the middle of nowhere, and there was nowhere to stop. That’s the thing about trains: they rattle on.

I paced our tiny cabin—it was, unfortunately, not an appropriate size for grand deductions—while Juliette sat and stared out the window. Our room had been converted back into the comfortable seating arrangement, the beds packed up and flipped into the wall by the invisible team of service staff when we went for breakfast. Outside there was smoke on the horizon. Juliette tilted her knees to the wall every time I got to her.

“I think you should sit down,” she said after my hundredth lap, patting the seat next to her. “You’re going to walk a hole through the floor.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, turning back for another five-step lap.

“It makes perfect sense. An overweight alcoholic had a heart attack.” She acted out dusting her hands. “Case closed, Detective.”

“An overweight alcoholic who everyone on this train hated.”

“Just because you hated him doesn’t mean everyone else did,” Juliette cautioned.

“Everyone had cause to.” I counted them off on my fingers. “Royce felt betrayed he didn’t get the endorsement. Wyatt wants him to keep writing the Morbund books—I heard them arguing. Simone wants to sign him up.”

“Listen to yourself! None of this is worth killing for. A few petty jealousies and disagreements.” Juliette mimicked my counting, exaggeratedly flicking each finger. “Lisa has the endorsement. Simone, I’d wager, wants him alive to sign him, just like Wyatt would want him alive to write more books.”

“They might feel spurned if he said no.”

“I’m not an expert, but killing your cash cow seems like a bad negotiation tactic. And then everyone else is a fan of his.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly?” She tucked her legs to the wall.

I spun. “Maybe Brooke’s obsessed with him.”

“Ooooh.” She wriggled her fingers spookily at me. “Motive.”

“You weren’t at the panel yesterday. It was supercharged. S. F. Majors has some kind of grudge against him too. Their conversation was fiery. And”—I got excited, remembering—“there was a woman in his room last night.”

Juliette folded her arms, but I could tell there was a new spark of curiosity. “Last night?”

“I heard—”

“You were snooping even before he’d been killed?”

“No. I went to confront him about the review.”

Legs to the wall. “Really? Ernest—”

“I changed my mind. When I got to his cabin, Royce was already there, banging on the door. But McTavish wouldn’t come out. Royce said he heard a woman in there with him.”

Juliette seemed unconvinced but sat a little forward. “And is this when you heard Wyatt tell him he wanted more Morbund books?”

“That was later,” I said sheepishly. “In the hall.”

“And you weren’t snooping.”

“I got up to . . . be sick. I’d had too much to drink.”

“So you were drunk, then.”

I stumbled into her knees; she hadn’t tilted them this time. I steeled my reply. “I know what I heard.”

“All I’m saying is, if this was in a mystery, you wouldn’t trust the intoxicated witness.”

“I wasn’t drunk.”

“I’m not trying to argue with you, Ern. I’m trying to help. All this is, it’s simply confirmation bias. You want it to not add up.”

“Why would I want that?”

“Because you’re thinking there’s a book in it.”

“I’m thinking there’s a crime.”

“Is there a difference, to you?”

I stopped pacing and collapsed into the seat next to her. I put a hand on her knee and watched the desert flick past for a moment. “Okay,” I said at last. “My curiosity is a little selfish. But think about how these things play out.” I thought about my list, my schematic for how a murder mystery is supposed to go: 60,000 words: A second murder. “There’s never just one murder in these things. There’s always at least two.”

Juliette put a hand on top of mine. “This is real life, not a book. It doesn’t have to follow any of your rules. Most importantly, it doesn’t have to play fair.”

“But what if I’m right? What if this person’s just getting started? What if,” I appealed, “I can stop them . . . this time?”

That was the key to it all, those two words. This time. So many people had died on the mountain. If I’d been smarter, if I’d acted faster, maybe it could have been different. There were too many links and too many secrets bubbling under our little group to write off McTavish’s death as a coincidence. Didn’t I at least have a responsibility to see what I could find out?

And maybe, not that I believe in this kind of stuff, but maybe even if I didn’t deserve to be here, I was meant to be.

“If I do nothing,” I said, “everything that happens from here is my fault.”

“It’s not your job,” Juliette said softly. “And it’s not—not now and not then—your fault.”

“I know that,” I said, in a way that made it clear that I didn’t.

Juliette chewed her lip, knowing I was both waiting for and not really asking for her permission. “If you need this—just for you, not for any other reason—then ask some questions. Sure. But just enough to feel comfortable that this is exactly what it looks like. Don’t try and prove that McTavish was murdered. Try and prove to yourself that he wasn’t.”

It feels smug writing this out in retrospect, because, well . . . obviously I have the hindsight and the stab wound to say how wrong she was. But Juliette’s advice was, at the time, really quite good. I found my agitation calming.

“Okay. So it’ll come down to how he died. If it was murder”—I caught her eye—“which I’m not saying it was! But I need to either find or rule out the method.”

“Sounds like a starting point.”

“It must be poison. In his flask?”

“That’s how I’d do it.” Juliette shrugged.

The intercom crackled and Aaron’s voice came on, telling us that we’d be reaching Alice Springs in two hours, and the staff would appreciate it enormously if we could all stay in our rooms until then.

Alice Springs was a rural community, home to about thirty thousand people. Enough for a police station and a morgue. They would take McTavish’s body off the train there. I was on the clock.

I stood up. “I need to see the body.”

“What? Why?”

“To see if he’s been poisoned.”

“And how are you going to tell? You’re not a doctor. You’re not even a detective.”

“Last time—”

“There was an actual doctor with us. This is not the same. You’d need an autopsy, for starters, toxicology tests. Wait for Alice Springs. You need the experts.”

Something McTavish said bounced up inside my brain. If one of the six of us was to die right now, you’d have five suspects who all know how to get away with murder.

Maybe we had experts on the train after all. Five crime writers, each specializing in a different field. Five people who had spent decades researching every way to solve a crime. Or commit one.

I hadn’t even spoken but Juliette started vehemently shaking her head. “No. Ern. That doesn’t count.”

“Hear me out.”

“You need an autopsy. And someone who knows the actual law, otherwise you risk compromising evidence.”

“We’ve got both of those.”

“No, you don’t. These people are writers.”

“Royce used to be a forensic pathologist. Lisa was in law. They’re experts.” I was talking mostly to myself now, ticking off everyone’s qualifications in a rapid mutter. “Forensic thrillers. Legal thrillers. Majors knows criminal psychology—interviews, profiles, that sort of thing. That’ll help. And Wolfgang—well, I suppose literary fiction is a bit useless.”

This is, for the most part, true. Wolfgang’s contributions, except for a stunning bit of literary deduction involving a comma late in the piece, are lackluster.

“And where do you put yourself in this crack crime-fighting team?”

“Well,” I said, a little proudly, “I know the rules.”

At this, Juliette threw up her hands. “If this makes it into the book, I refuse to be a nagging girlfriend. So it feels pointless to remind you, again, that this is real life and no one has to follow any murder-mystery rules. But if you insist on making me a side character, I won’t be a part of this don’t-go-in-there pantomime any longer.” She turned away from me and looked out the window.

Silence is a tap left running: it fills and fills until it overflows and becomes insurmountable.

Honestly, we’d never really fought before. Clothes on the floor and who takes the trash out are small-fry compared to the serial killer we’d fought, and so it had never occurred to us that we possessed any household dramatics worth raised voices. But the cabin was flooded and the felt box in my pocket heavier than ever. This wasn’t in my plan.

If one advantage of writing this out again is to gloat when I am correct, a disadvantage is having to relive when I am wrong. I should have said a lot more in that moment. I should have realized that Juliette wasn’t asking me to not care about McTavish’s death, she was asking me to care about her. That she wasn’t asking me not to go, she was asking me to stay. Those words may seem the same on paper, but they mean very different things.

Those of you hoping I said the right thing next haven’t paid enough attention: my mistakes are voluminous and swift. I’m a double-down kind of guy. So I stood, which was a bad start, as no one likes arguing from a height difference. And then I said the worst possible combination of words (dare I say, not only in this conversation, but in general social terms) I could have chosen:

“I need to talk to Alan Royce.”

Chapter 13

Royce was in the corridor, fist raised, when I opened my door. He wore a frog-faced look of surprise. It took me a second to realize that he hadn’t been magically summoned by my words: he had been just about to knock on my door.

I pushed him back into the hallway and stepped out before Juliette could see him.

“Good timing,” I said, leading without asking. I knew where his room was from putting him to bed last night. “Shall we talk in your cabin?”

Royce took a beat, clearly unfamiliar with being delightedly received, before trotting along behind me. He’d taken the forced quarantine as an opportunity to have a shower, but the hangover was still a coat hanger around his shoulders, over his slumped head, as if the vapors of his excess were marionette strings holding him up and dragging him along.

I hadn’t chosen Royce’s cabin merely to get him away from Juliette. I also wanted to snoop. I hardly thought he’d have vials of poison open on the windowsill (preferably with unsubtle skull-and-crossbones labels), but it was worth a shot.

I gave him the courtesy of opening his own door: the illusion of an invitation. I hadn’t seen the room properly in the dark, but I was shocked by the state of it now. It looked like he’d been there a month, not a mere twenty-four hours: clothes spilled across the carpet and junk-food wrappers, sheaves of random papers and empty bottles ranging from water to beer filled the gaps. His carpet should have been on the side of a milk carton: it was that missing. I sidestepped into the room like I was avoiding mousetraps. My ankle nudged something damp, and I shivered as I kicked aside a balled-up towel.

Perhaps because he’d slept in, the bunks hadn’t been flipped, so Royce and I frowned and grunted and managed to figure out how to roll the top bunk into the wall so we could at least sit down on the bottom bed. Royce positioned himself by the little table at the window, took out his notebook and tapped a capped pen on the page. The page was filled with scribbles in blue ink. I could see my name underlined halfway down.

“So,” he said. “You got that murder you wanted, then.”

I didn’t mention that it was Royce who had wished for the murder, not me. Instead, I said, “You think it’s murder?”

“Why else are we here?” He uncapped the pen. It was elegant, thumb-thick and with ornate silver details on the body and the cap. The tip had been designed to look like an antique dip pen, though with a modern ink feed so a well wasn’t needed, and sharp enough that it must have felt tortured by serving Royce’s dull words. “Shall we start with last night?”

“Yes, please.” He was surprisingly open to being interrogated. I gave myself a mental pat on the back for the refinement of my detective skills. “What do you remember?”

“I remember you.” He jabbed the pen at me. “You were all steamed up, wanting to talk to Henry. Quite aggressive, I thought.”

“I think you have the two of us confused. You were the one bashing down his door.”

“So you didn’t want to talk to Henry?”

“Of course I did. That’s not the point. You said last night you heard voices. Through the door?”

Royce nodded. “They shut up when I started knocking. But Henry was talking to someone. A woman. Lisa Fulton.”

“You’re sure it was Lisa?”

He shrugged. “It sounded like her.”

“It sounded like her, or it was her?”

“I keep forgetting you’re new to this”—Royce raised an eyebrow—“but there’s more than one way to get a blurb. Follow?”

What had Royce said over breakfast the day before? Unless he owes you a favor. I understood the implication. Lisa and Henry.

Sex is always a good motive in these books, of course, but it felt a little easy here. A relationship between Lisa and McTavish certainly mounted a case against Royce’s jealousy. But if that was true, the victim was wrong. Royce was far more likely to lash out at Lisa than Henry. I could see it in the way his lip curled around the words more than one way. There’s nothing like good old-fashioned sexism, and it fit Royce well enough to be tailored.

Of course, Royce had been drunk and he had a reason to dislike Lisa. How certain was I that he’d heard correctly? Plenty of women were at the festival: Cynthia, Harriet, Majors, Simone, Brooke, Juliette and Veronica Blythe’s book club to name the most notable. And, depending on his drunkenness, the person with McTavish might not even have been a woman. Can you tell gender from a whisper? It’s hard to identify a voice speaking behind a door.

On the other hand, while it takes two to tango and only one remained alive, it seemed that Lisa already had what she wanted out of their possible exchange. The cover was revealed, the book endorsed. She’d hurried from the panel with grateful tears in her eyes. The late-night rendezvous could have been, well, a reward. Salacious, sure. But motive it wasn’t.

Still, Lisa and McTavish having a clandestine meeting the night before he was murdered seemed a pretty good starting point.

“You said you wanted to talk to Henry,” Royce interrupted my thoughts, “and then you changed your mind. Why?”

“I saw you there,” I said honestly. “I realized I was being rash, and I thought better of it.” I stopped short of explaining that seeing him as a cringe-worthy vision of my future had knocked some sense into me.

“You were angry?”

“Of course I was angry. About that bloody review.”

He wrote that down.

I took the pause as a chance to ask the next question. “This morning, you saw everything that happened. Poison?”

“Was it?”

“You’re the forensic pathologist.”

“Where . . . put it?” He mumbled this sentence so I only half caught it and reconstructed from the words I did hear. Where would you put it?

“In the hip flask,” I said. “Right?”

Royce wrote it down. “Suppose so.”

“Suppose?”

“If that’s what you’re telling me.”

If I may, here: you’re lucky Royce isn’t writing this book because I believe he’d be the unreliable sort.

“I’m not telling you anything. I’m seeking your . . .”—I had to root-canal the word out of my teeth—“expertise.”

Royce picked up his notepad and flipped it back a page like a traffic cop giving a fine. He blew out his cheeks in thought, and I reckon if I’d lit a match the cabin would have exploded with the pure gasoline he hissed into the air. I peered over at his page of scribbles. Among the other notes I saw he had all those Goodreads reviews written out, one per line, in ascending order, starting with my one-star review and then following with the others:

Wolfgang: ** Heavenly

S. F. Majors: *** Overblown

Me: **** Splendid

Instead of Lisa’s name, he’d violently written Trollop. Then, clearly with shaking hands, her five stars and the review: Tremendous.

On my quick glimpse, I noted both the oddity of S. F. Majors’s rather harsh wording against her rather mild stars, and the inverse for Wolfgang. It was almost like they were deliberately the wrong way around.

Royce saw me spying on his notes and tilted the notebook away. He cleared his throat, glanced at the door. “Maybe we should talk in the bar?” His words wobbled, a little nervous.

“I’m okay here. You all right?”

“Why me?”

“Because—are you serious?—how many times do I have to tell you? I want your help. You used to work in forensics. You’re as close to a doctor as I’ve got.”

Royce puffed a little at that. “You want me to solve it?”

I shrugged, which was the most I could summon.

He cleared his throat. “Okay. I think I’ve got it all. There’s just one thing I don’t understand.”

I was, if I’m honest with you, a bit affronted that he had the crime worked out not only so early on, but also so far ahead of me. I know it seems heartless. Solving crimes is supposed to be about bringing a murderer to justice, not about who got there first, but still . . . out of everyone, did it have to be Royce?

Of course, there’s a whole lot of this book to go, and so you already know that means that either Royce is wrong, or he’ll be killed before he can tell me. I will refrain from stating my preference on this particular matter. I will tell you that I won’t figure everything out myself until chapter 31, when Andy, it pains me to write, provides an assist.

I stood. “You’ve solved it?”

Royce’s head swiveled, looking past me to the door. “Almost,” he squeaked.

I took an excited step toward him. “Tell me, then. What’s missing?”

Royce squeezed against the window, away from me, then said, “Where you got the heroin.”

“Heroin?”

“I mean, we can call it poison if you like. Heroin is technically poison, even if it’s not as commonly used as cyanide or arsenic or whatever else is popular in novels these days. But effective all the same. That was an overdose we saw. Heroin is a nervous system suppressant, so it slows down things like circulation, breathing. I researched it for Dr. Jane Black, Book Nine. The cause of death, I’d say, was an anoxic brain injury. Means no oxygen gets to the brain. Cells die, and it switches off.”

I remembered McTavish’s blue-tinged face, his sharp breaths. His eyes disconnecting from his brain, like a switch flipped. On. Off. Dead. It made sense. “Heroin,” I muttered to myself. Then realized, “Wait, you just said where did I—”

I paused. Took in the scene. I was standing up. Royce was squeezed hard against the wall, glancing at the door. My name in his notebook, underlined. “Hang on. What do you think’s going on here?”

“You’ve just confessed,” Royce said.

“Confessed?”

“Well, I’m interviewing you.”

“I’m interviewing you,” I huffed.

“Why do you get to interview me, and I don’t get to interview you?”

“Because I’m the narrator!”

“Not in my book.”

Thinking back on our conversation, I realized Royce had indeed been asking many of the questions. I’d been following the rules for mystery novels, such as excluding Juliette, predicated on myself being the detective. In Royce’s book, in his head, he was the detective and I was a suspect. Hell, apparently, I was the killer.

“You can’t seriously think I’d—” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

Royce flicked through his notebook pages. Read his notes aloud. “You went to Henry’s cabin last night in a”—he drew his finger down the page until he found it—“rash mood. You were angry with him over that review. One star, ghastl—”

“I know the review, mate.”

Royce’s finger moved along his page. He sounded like a child reading in front of class. “You changed your mind about confronting him because a witness was there. That would be myself. You decided to use poison. You put it in his hip flask.”

“I thought you said where would the murderer put it. I was asking if you thought it was poison, not telling you it was.” I flung up my hands.

Royce flinched.

“Disregarding the fact that your theory has holes all over it—I don’t carry around bloody heroin, and if I did I wouldn’t just waltz in and confess to the first person who asked me any questions about it—I don’t have any motive. A bad review isn’t motive. I don’t care how mad I was, it’s not worth killing over.”

“It isn’t,” Royce said, and flipped back two pages. I couldn’t see the writing, but it was clearly a note he’d taken before our conversation. “But a hundred thousand dollars might be.”

“What?”

“You have an undelivered book to write,” Royce went on. “If you don’t deliver, you’ll have to hand the money back, and you’re suffering for inspiration because no one’s bitten the dust around you for a while.”

I faltered. One hundred thousand dollars was annoyingly correct. “Who told you—”

He cut me off. “You told your literary agent”—he flicked back even further, right to the inside cover—“that people, sort of, have to die in order for you to write a book. I was standing right behind you in the line to get on board. And I always knew there was something unsavory about your first book. Something that didn’t quite add up. So I knew you were planning something. I’ve been watching you this whole time, taking notes, making sure that I’d see what you were trying to do before you did it.”

My mouth flapped like a fish’s. Royce hadn’t been writing general notes: he’d been keeping track of me. The world’s worst amateur detective had invented an entire murder mystery out of one overheard sentence as I stepped on the train.

But Royce wasn’t done. “And now you’re here, telling me exactly what you did, because you’re going to kill me and pin me as the villain and then write another book about it.” He stood up, uncapped the pen and held it out like a sword. “Not today! Not with this writer.”

I took what I thought was a placating step toward him, but he jabbed the pen in the general air in front of me. “Keep away from me. I took a self-defense class while researching Dr. Jane Black, Book Six.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.

“It taught me some valuable techniques.”

“Not the self-defense class, that you think I’m a murderer.” I reached forward and plucked the pen, quite easily as it happens, out of his grasp.

I am not one for reflexes but Royce’s required an archaeologist to find. He clutched the air where the pen used to be, then gave a little yelp and plopped back onto the bed, arms raised in front of his head in an X.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” I said. “And I’m not about to start with you.”

He lowered his hands slightly, peering at me from above his forearms. “You just wanted my . . . opinion?” Royce, who is a man so comfortable giving his opinion when it is not asked for that he assumedly found being asked for it quite the rarity, still seemed confused.

“I suspected there might be something in the flask. You’re the only one with forensic experience, so I thought if we put our heads together we might figure it out. And voilà: heroin. It wasn’t the conversation I thought we’d have, but we got there.”

Royce had settled back enough into his skin to choose petulance. “Can I have my pen back? It’s special.”

I held it up, noticing it had Gemini Publishing on the side. McTavish and Royce’s publisher, and Wyatt Lloyd’s company. “It’s nice.” I pressed my thumb into the tip. Watched it dimple the skin. “Sharp. A gift?”

“For my first book. A welcome-to-the-party kind of thing.” He held his hand out, begging for it back.

Fair enough, I thought, publishers liked giving welcome gifts. I’d gotten a mug and a bottle of champagne, which ironically reflected a writer’s hobbies somewhat more than a pen did.

“I’m not ruling you out as a suspect, you know,” Royce huffed. “Or . . . or . . . maybe someone’s trying to help you write. Provide you inspiration from afar.”

I’d already opened the door to leave.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to see if they’ll let me look at the body.” I tossed the pen at him. “You coming?”

Chapter 14

“Absolutely no way”—Aaron’s arms clamped shut so fast over his chest they could have been a bear trap—“am I letting you lot poke a corpse.”

He blockaded the walkway from the bar through to the restaurant. The sound of Cynthia scrubbing the spot where McTavish had vomited, a bucket of soapy water beside her, carried through the now empty carriage. The body had been cleared away, the wet stain the only evidence that someone had died there an hour ago. Without the hubbub of the guests, I could hear the glasses behind the bar tinkle and chime as the train rocked.

“We can help,” I pleaded. “We have experience.”

Aaron looked us up and down like he was choosing us for five-a-side. “The poor bloke’s past helping. We’re an hour from Alice. If I can ask you to sit tight in your rooms for just a little longer, we’ll have this all cleared up.”

“We’re not offering to help Henry,” Royce said. “We’re offering to help you.”

“I appreciate it, Mr. Royce, but we have it very much under control. As unfortunate as the circumstances are, we are well trained in such eventualities.” Aaron extended an arm behind us, toward our cabins. Behind him, Cynthia still scratched at the floor, yellow gloves to her elbows. The carriage smelled like bleach. “Now, if I could ask you to return to your cabins.”

“You have murders on this train often, then?” I asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“We think Henry McTavish was murdered,” I said, grimacing at including Royce in that we, but needs must. “And while you might be practiced in the odd old bird dropping off in their sleep, when it comes to murder, trust me, you’re going to need our help.”

Aaron clicked his tongue. I could see him replaying McTavish’s death in his mind. He huffed air through his nose as he settled on a decision. “I appreciate your concerns, but Mr. McTavish lived a life of excess, it appears. It caught up to him. That’s all there is here.”

“You’re wrong,” Royce spat.

Aaron’s eyes went hard. “I’ve been very accommodating with you both—”

“He means, what if you’re wrong? If there’s been a murder on the train, that means there’s a murderer,” I added, with a smile I hoped was more magnanimous than deviant. “You can cart off the body in Alice, sure, but by the time you figure out we’re right, we’ll be halfway to Adelaide, and you and all your guests will be trapped with a killer.” I lingered on the word guests. The magic password here was so obvious I only had to hint at it: corporate liability.

Aaron frowned and checked his watch. I could see him calculating the value in our opinions versus the time it would take to get to Alice Springs, where the real police would be better placed to help him, killer or not. “When you say . . . experience . . .” He twirled a finger in the air, speaking warily, still unsure, but the opening was there. “You’re not police.”

“We have skills,” I said.

“You’re writers.”

“Royce used to be a forensic pathologist.”

Aaron was unimpressed. “And what did you used to be?”

I ignored the dig and tried one more Hail Mary, spreading my arms wide. “Look, I get it. It seems ridiculous. But I’ve been here before. I’ve looked a serial killer in the eye. I’ve had people die in front of me. People I could have—should have—helped. So when I tell you I know what we might be up against, I’m not doing it for bragging rights, I’m not doing it for kicks.” I paused, and then decided to just tell him the truth. “I’m doing it because I’m scared.”

Royce gave me a judgmental look: Wuss. I heard Cynthia rip her dishwashing gloves off behind me with a wet thuck and toss them in her bucket.

I lowered my voice. I knew I was cooking up a pantomime here, but I needed to be as over-the-top as possible to get past Aaron’s disinterest. “This killer doesn’t strike at night or in shadows. They struck in broad daylight, in front of all the other passengers. You think a killer like that stops at just one? You think they’re following the train timetable? No. McTavish was just the start. And if you think an hour’s not so long, that you can wait it out, well, I hope for your sake we’re wrong.” I grabbed Royce’s shoulder. “Come on, Alan. We’re going back to our cabins and barricading the doors. Aaron, I advise you to do the same. Otherwise some people on this train are going to ‘used to be’ a lot of things. And I don’t mean retirement.”

Royce, who hadn’t figured out my plan, was like a boulder to turn around, but eventually fell into grumbling step. “Ernest, we have to see the body,” he mumbled under his breath.

I hissed at him to shut up.

We kept walking.

Aaron’s hand on my shoulder came right on cue.

“Five minutes, okay? And just so you can tell me if any of the guests are in danger. You better not be screwing around. So help me God, there’s coppers in Alice who owe me a favor and they will throw the bloody book at you.”

Henry McTavish’s death had been violent, but without gore or evisceration, and so his body was unmarked. He looked physically similar to when he was alive—a little paler, perhaps—and there was a trickle of vomit on his chin, though that could be passed off as sleeping drool. But, in death, his body lacked something more indefinable, like an elastic band without the snap. A lettuce without the crunch. Prose without voice.

I raised a fist to my mouth and covered a dry retch. This was the eighth dead body I’d been unfortunate enough to come across in my life. I don’t know the magic number to desensitize a person, but I do know I wasn’t quite there. As I write this, thankfully as an outpatient and in a hotel room now, I’m up to ten and it still makes me queasy.

We were in cabin L1, in the staff carriage between the restaurant and the Chairman’s Carriage. Aaron had explained that these were actually all staff cabins, but that L1 doubled as a spare room for medical needs. I read between the lines: most people, if they died on the train, were simply tucked up into bed until the next station. If a body had to be moved, because the deceased was, say, sharing with someone, it was placed in L1. Despite his private carriage, I assumed McTavish had been relegated here as the Ghan wouldn’t want rumor of the finest class of room being haunted. Aaron told me that on full trains, which this was not, the staff members drew straws for who slept in L1. Clean sheets mean nothing on a mattress’s memories.

Royce, aware that we were on a countdown to both Alice Springs and Aaron’s feeble allowance being overtaken by sanity, immediately got on his knees and started fossicking around the corpse. I peered over from behind him, and Aaron hovered anxiously in the doorway.

Royce prised McTavish’s mouth open, using a handkerchief in the absence of gloves, pulled out his tongue like it was a toy and probed his inner cheeks. Aaron swallowed audibly.

“This kind of stuff happen much on your shift?” I asked him, as a distraction.

“Oh, um. I mean there’s the occasional—” His eyes flickered to McTavish, then back to me. He forgot the rest of his sentence and simply said, “Natural causes.”

I’ve always found that phrase fascinating. Human beings, by nature, are so easily overtaken by emotion, our base urges. We feel certain things so keenly—love, sure, but also hatred—that we are practically designed to implode. Murder, it seems to me, is about as natural a cause as it gets.

“You’ve never had problems with the guests?” I pressed. “Fights and that?”

“We’re a luxury experience, not a backpackers’ cruise.” He looked over at Royce, who was currently pulling down the fleshy sacks under McTavish’s eyes and peering into the corners. “Although we’ve never had writers before.”

“You must have contingencies? Detainment?”

“I guess we could lock someone in the freezer if we had to, but I’ve never really thought about it. The Royal Flying Doctor Service would come in if it was something life-threatening, but for a big chunk of this journey we’re pretty remote, so we’ve all got a certain get-on-with-it attitude. We’re trained in crisis response, medical and such, in case something goes wildly off course, but it’s not like it’s hardwired. We do the best we can.”

“Does this count as off course?”

Aaron shrugged. “I’ve seen worse.”

My boggled eyes meant I didn’t need to ask him to continue.

“About thirty years ago a school bus parked across the tracks. Before we were a hotel, back when we were doing freight. That’s haywire.” He blew air out through his teeth. Shook his head in memory. “Four kids and a teacher died, plus the bus driver of course.”

I know you’ll have twigged to the phrase about thirty years ago because the past, in mystery novels, never sleeps. A second case always becomes important to the overall solution, which, I’ll tell you now, is going to be the situation here. Of course, there are a few timelines and second cases to choose from.

I thought about the school bus. Rural communities tend to have only one school to cover very large areas, and the bus would not have been the traditional coach, it would have been a bulbous white minivan that relayed around the rural farmlands. The trip may have taken a couple of hours, crisscrossing the rail several times. “The conductor didn’t see it on the tracks?”

“This thing weighs—”

“Fourteen hundred tons,” Royce called from the floor, proving himself a ferroequinologist. He currently had McTavish’s left shoe and sock off and was fiddling with his toes. Whether we’d passed from autopsy into fetish, I wasn’t quite sure. McTavish had died from a poisoned hip flask, not a rusty nail.

“Exactly.” Aaron turned back to me. “We can’t stop on a dime. You should see our three-point turns. I was an apprentice engineer back then. First job, eighteen. It’s hard to forget. It wasn’t our fault.”

I had a sudden image of tiny palms pressed against windows. A thousand tons of steel barreling down. “How could the bus miss this huge train coming at them?”

“Bus driver was a bit hard to ask, flat as he was. Hard to check things like the engine or transmission weren’t busted too—they were all blown apart. Is this going to take much longer?”

Royce hustled McTavish into a seated position, muttered hold this like he was a mechanic with a screwdriver between his teeth, and shoved McTavish in my direction. I had a second’s hesitation at adding my fingerprints to a crime scene, but the corpse was drooping toward me and I figured, with Royce’s hands all over his tongue and toes, we were past such decisions. I stepped in and held on to his shoulders, keeping him tilted forward, while Royce fumbled off his coat, tapping me to lift one hand here, another there.

Without his coat, McTavish showed more signs of death. The veins in his neck were bold rivulets of blue. Royce set about rolling up McTavish’s sleeves, and I noticed that the skin on McTavish’s left arm was rippled and glossy, the type of mottled flesh caused by burns long healed. This continued up to the side of his neck and assumedly also down his leg. The hit-and-run he’d barely survived, remembered by his skin.

Royce looked inside the creases of both elbows. Then he stood up. “I need to see his room. And the flask.”

Aaron checked his watch again. He’d indulged us with a look at the body under the guise of passenger security, but now we had fewer than forty-five minutes before the real police would board the train, and his caution was kicking in again.

Royce stepped into the bathroom and called out over the sound of the faucet as he washed his hands, “I suspect it’s a drug overdose. I’m sorry we alarmed you, but it pays to be prudent. I just need to check his room and see if any environmental factors, drug paraphernalia and the like, can contribute to my conclusions.”

This mix of truth, in the cause of death, and lies, in our reason for looking at McTavish’s room, was a particularly brilliant piece of manipulation, sold all the more heavily by the casualness with which Royce had expressed it while drying his hands, swapping our intimidation tactics for exactly what Aaron had always wanted to hear. Royce was giving Aaron the opportunity to prove himself right, and Aaron took it.

We exited L1 and Aaron slid the door shut, hanging the cardboard handle-hanger that said Shhhhh—I’m still sleeping in lieu of being able to lock the door, which I thought was more than a little ironic. We followed him down the hall. In the rickety space between carriages, muffled by the clanking of iron and the wind whistling through the gaps, I whispered to Royce, “Didn’t know you were into feet.”

He shook his head. “Junkies usually shoot up in their arms, but if those veins collapse, or if they’re trying to hide an addiction, they shoot up somewhere more discreet—the side of their eyes, or in between their toes.”

“He’s clean,” I surmised.

“Drunk? Yes. Druggie? No. Murdered? Definitely.”

Aaron unlocked the door to the Chairman’s Carriage and swung it open. His shout of surprise cut off my conversation with Royce and we turned to hear him say into McTavish’s room, “What the hell are you doing in here?”

Chapter 15

Brooke’s hands shot into the air as if we’d come in brandishing guns. The blood didn’t just drain from her face, it siphoned down her legs, through the floor and onto the tracks, leaving her with bone-china cheeks and pale, thin lips puckered in surprise.

“These are private quarters,” Aaron said.

“This is a crime scene,” I said.

“Who are you?” Royce said.

I had been so surprised to see her I hadn’t properly taken in the opulence of the Chairman’s Carriage. Though it was named so, I hadn’t quite realized that Henry’s room would be an entire carriage. We’d entered into a private sitting room that could easily seat ten or so people. A yellow leather couch ran in a semicircle against the east wall, facing a table piled with some scattered papers. A television was mounted on the far wall. That particular detail stood out the most to me: to be rich enough to afford this cabin but indifferent to the view you were paying for. Another indulgence was betrayed by the small deposit of ash on the carpet by my feet: a flagrant breach of the no-smoking rule. There was a whiff of blueberry in the air, rather than cigarettes, though. The design of the furniture was like any hotel lobby: wood paneling (not fake, as in my room) and gold-trim finishes, even a glittering chandelier. The whole room felt like being in Air Force One.

Royce picked up a half-full bottle of whiskey and whistled.

“Pricey?” I asked. A number on the side of the bottle was older than I was, which answered my question for me.

Brooke’s scrapbook was next to the messy stack of papers, and I realized they were strewn not because McTavish had left them in a mess, but because she’d been interrupted going through them. She saw my gaze land on them, and the burgeoning excuse that had been bubbling on her lips transformed as she recognized what I’d said.

“Crime scene?” she said. “You think Henry was—” Her hand shot to her mouth. “Oh my God. Please don’t think I—”

“Don’t listen to them,” Aaron said. “They’re just . . . well, they’re supposed to be helping, but I’m undecided. No one’s accusing you of anything. Except lock-picking, I suppose.”

Brooke looked at her shoes. The color bungee-jumped back into her cheeks.

“He gave you a key,” I surmised. McTavish had told Brooke that morning it was a shame he’d had to drink his expensive whiskey alone, a hint to an invitation declined. “Last night.”

The tiniest of nods. “I wasn’t going to go. I wouldn’t.”

“Why take it then?” Royce asked. It was becoming abundantly clear that he was only able to consider female suspects based on a singular motive—sex—and didn’t understand that consent could be given and revoked.

“Henry McTavish was my hero,” Brooke said. “So, yeah, I was a little butterfly-y when he came up to me last night. That is what I wanted to happen. But I wanted it to be as a reader, as a fan. For us to bond over his books, and what they’d given me.”

I recalled her question at the panel: puzzling to me but painstakingly crafted to impress McTavish. Simone had said you had to speak to him in riddles and puzzles. Archie Bench. She’d come all this way to get the chance to say I understand your books better than anyone. It wasn’t so shallow as a crush or a seduction.

Her lip quivered as she continued, “And then he comes over, and I’m thinking this is the moment I’ve waited for. And he leans in—his breath reeks of alcohol—and he presses his room key into my hand. Doesn’t say anything. Just the key. The look on his face, like this was some kind of prize. Like I’d earned it.” She gagged a little at the memory. “I froze. By the time I’d recovered enough to really process what had just happened, he’d already started walking away. And I’d curled my hand around the key so tightly it almost cut my palm.”

“Nice performance, love.” Royce gave a slow clap. While he may have had some usefulness in forensics, his psychological insight was lacking: I needed S. F. Majors for that.

“So you didn’t come here last night?” I asked, thinking of Royce’s female voice behind the door. He’d only thought it was Lisa, he’d never actually seen her.

“Absolutely not. I slept in my own room.”

“Which is?” I asked, so I could sketch it later.

“The guest carriage.”

I waited for more specifics, but she hesitated. I realized I’d just told her there might be a killer on the train. She had every right to be cautious about a stranger asking where she slept.

“N, ah, 1,” she said eventually. “Look, I was going to talk to him after the panel. I didn’t sleep well. I was worried maybe I’d misread things. I wanted to clear the air with the benefit of sobriety and sunrise. At the very least I had to give him back the key. So I went to the Q and A. But that publisher guy stopped me.”

I remembered Wyatt brushing her aside, telling her there’d be signatures after the session.

“And then he had that heart attack and I thought”—her eyes flickered to the side, her first clear lie—“I’d put the key back myself.” She straightened, putting her hands on her hips. “I don’t know why you’re acting like this is an interrogation.”

None of us said anything. Aaron scratched the back of his calf with his toe.

“Oh. My. God.” She burst out laughing. “This is an interrogation. You think you’re actual detectives. Oh wow. That’s too good. Tell me, which one’s Holmes and which one’s Watson? Wait, let me guess.” She pointed at Royce, then wrinkled her nose. “Sidekick.”

Royce took a step toward her, but Aaron put an arm out. “I thought we were here to confirm cause of death. Not to hassle the guests.”

With the fear that our permission to poke around was about to be revoked, Royce and I launched into a great act of demonstratively looking for clues: bent backs and stroked chins. I inspected the waste bin, which had a wad of bloody tissues in it and a little white card that said From an admirer. Brooke’s words echoed: McTavish was my hero.

Extending from the lounge was a hallway not dissimilar to the regular accommodation halls, leading to four separate cabins. Two of these appeared untouched. The third was set up as a miniature office: a proper writing desk in front of the seat, a lone felt-tip pen sitting on it. The largest room was at the end: McTavish’s bedroom, more than double the size of a regular cabin and furnished with an unmade double bed in the middle of the room, a separate armchair facing the window, and McTavish’s suitcase open on the floor, tongues of jacket sleeves licking the carpet.

“Where’s his typewriter?” I asked, looking around.

“Huh?” Royce shrugged, then lifted the mattress: a predictable place to hide drugs. It was clean.

“McTavish,” I said. “Doesn’t he write all his manuscripts on a typewriter? He’s got the writing desk set up in the other room. No typewriter. No ink.”

“Well, he’s got a pen, doesn’t he?” Royce dropped the mattress, then got on his knees and tried to look under the bed. He fossicked about for a minute, then hauled himself back up, dusting his chest like he’d been exploring a haunted attic and not a five-star train carriage. “The tissues in the bin could indicate a nasal hemorrhage, which is not uncommon among heroin users.”

I knew he was lying. There’s no way Royce, no matter how long out of the profession he was, could have missed the purpling bridge of McTavish’s nose. I’d seen it even before he’d died. Those tissues in the bin hadn’t been from using. Someone had given him a bloody nose last night.

But that lie I could stomach. It was the same one Royce had told Aaron back in L1; he wanted Aaron to believe our nosiness was useful, and he also didn’t want anyone to steal his limelight. The lie I couldn’t abide was that, when Royce stood up, I saw a flash of paper disappear into his pocket. He’d found something under the bed.

Now, destroying evidence is par for the course for a guilty party, and it crossed my mind that Royce had secreted something self-incriminating. But Royce, unlike his books, was also a pretty easy read. I was sure Brooke’s needling of him as my sidekick had bruised his ego and he wanted to prove himself the Holmes to my Watson, not the other way around. I suspected he was stealing the evidence merely to beat me to the solution.

We locked eyes for a second and it was clear our marriage of convenience had reached a hasty divorce. I’m sorry to those who love a trope: no bromance here.

“I still need to see the flask,” Royce said to Aaron. “It might have trace.”

Aaron unclipped the walkie-talkie on his belt and radioed into it. “Cynthia. Any chance you’ve got the flask that our poor fella was drinking out of?”

“Yeah,” Cynthia crackled back.

“Could you hang on to it? Reckon we might need some forensics.”

“Forensics? You think—”

“I don’t know. But better safe than sorry.”

“Sorry, boss. I washed it.” Her voice was ditzy, almost deliberately so. I could picture her twirling a strand of hair around a finger. “Was I not supposed to or something?”

Royce rolled his eyes. I’ll note that Cynthia was also the one to wash the carpet where the flask spilled out, and given I’ve already mentioned destroying evidence is worth keeping an eye on, we can consider her a suspect. But I also thought it a bit rich of Royce to criticize her when he had evidence in his pocket. So I’m just pointing that out, because, you know: fair play.

“You’re a moron,” Royce said, leaning into Aaron’s radio. “You’ve jeopardized the whole investigation.”

“I have to press the button for her to hear,” Aaron said. “Like this.”

“You’re a . . . oh, forget it.” Royce sighed. Anger is hard to summon twice. “Thank you, Cynthia.”

“Who was that?” Cynthia crackled through.

“Alan Royce,” Aaron said.

“The jerk?”

“This is a speaker, Cynthia.”

It was turning farcical, so I mentioned I was going to take another look at the lounge. Alan wanted to search the two untouched bedrooms again, and I gladly headed back on my own. Brooke was still sitting on the couch. I wasn’t sure if Aaron had told her to wait or if she’d just stayed out of curiosity, but I considered it a win: if Royce could hide evidence from me, I could hide an interview from him.

“It’s not a good look,” I said, picking up some of the papers from the table. “You know that, surely?”

She scratched her right arm, which had a trucker’s tan—sunburned on one arm only—from sitting by the window in her cabin too long, I assumed. “I didn’t know it was a murder until ten minutes ago.”

I studied the papers in my hands. McTavish’s notes had barely any substance to them, and his handwriting was so varied it was possible to chart at which points he was sober and at which he was drunk depending on the legibility. One page said decapitation—survival? Research in massive letters. Another: Morbund. Film meeting. Hugh Jackman. Is this a musical? Ryan Reynolds. Is this a comedy?

“Come on,” I said, tapping the pages on the table. “That’s not why you were here.”

“Are you playing wannabe detective?” She pointed at me, drew a finger up and down my figure. Pursed her lips.

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“What do you want me to say? I told you the truth.”

“You didn’t. And I’m not accusing you of murder, by the way. But he’s your favorite author, and he’s just finished off a series with your favorite character. And now he’s really finished with the series. So I’m thinking about what I would do, as a fan, to get one last piece.”

“Okay, fine. Well done.” She threw a bunch of papers onto the table. One fluttered to the carpet. “I came for a souvenir, okay? Just something, anything, he’d written.”

“Like this?” I picked up the sheet from the floor. One of the advantages of my injury was that, even if I hadn’t been gloved, I doubted I had any fingerprints, so I tried to use my right hand for anything I thought was evidence. The sheet of paper had a red camel at the bottom, the same as the notepad Juliette and I had in our room. Across the top were the words Archibald Bench. Beneath was a series of underline dashes, designations for empty letters, as if he’d been playing a game of Hangman. This was followed by a jumble of letters, then the word Archie! complete with ecstatic exclamation mark. Below that was the word Reich, underlined. The handwriting was somewhere between the sober and drunk McTavish scrawls, and given it looked like he was trying to solve his own puzzle, I figured it wasn’t his at all and had actually fallen out of Brooke’s scrapbook. This was how she’d pieced together whatever lay behind Archibald Bench.

Brooke snatched the paper from me. “Perhaps.”

“The manuscript’s not here,” I said. “Which is what you were really looking for.”

“I was not.” She sold it with the fake indignance of an unfaithful spouse, but curiosity overwhelmed her. “How’d you know that?”

“I heard McTavish deliver it to Wyatt Lloyd last night. It’ll be in his cabin.”

“So what? I was looking for a novel. Is that so bad?”

“Depends. I was sorry to see your book got ruined. Misery, right? Want me to tell you how it ends?”

Brooke put on the shocked air of a courtesan who had just been propositioned. “I would never.”

“I don’t know if you’re far enough in to know much about Annie Wilkes—”

“You are drawing a long-ass bow.”

This stalled my questioning. I now had three possible theories that involved Brooke. One: she’d been so mad at McTavish for killing her favorite hero that she’d lashed out. Two: she’d been so repulsed, so crushed, by his proposition to her that she’d taught him a lesson. Three: she’d figured out something about Archibald Bench, jotted it in her notepad, and told McTavish what she knew about it that morning at the panel in code. His invite to his cabin might not have been sexual after all, if he thought she knew something she shouldn’t. He might have wanted to talk to her about Archibald Bench. Maybe even try to silence her.

Two of those confrontations may have plausibly ended in self-defense. A broken nose and a bin full of bloodied tissues. I wasn’t sure whether any of them added up to murder.

The second theory held the most water, given what Royce had in his pocket. But of course I didn’t know what that was yet, so neither can you.

“Okay, now it’s my turn,” Brooke said. “Heart attack, huh?”

“I think it’s fairly obvious I suspect otherwise.”

“And so far, am I your only suspect?”

“Well, you’re the only one inside the crime scene, so by that virtue, sure.”

Brooke picked up her scrapbook and leafed through it. It was a collection of articles and photographs, shoddily glued in. Henry McTavish accepting an award. A certificate that had the words Morbund’s Mongrels on it. She stopped flipping on a yellowed newspaper article and slid the scrapbook over to me.

The first thing I logged was the date: August 2003. Brooke looked in her late teens, early twenties. “Surely you didn’t collect this when you were a child?”

“Wasn’t even born, mate. You suspect me of being a big enough fan to murder someone but not to photocopy the occasional newspaper from the library? Jesus. You need all the help you can get. Read the damn thing.”

STARS OF THE FUTURE

Oliver Wright, 19 August 2003, Edinburgh

A YEAR AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF HIS DEBUT GLOBAL BESTSELLER, HENRY MCTAVISH HAS RETURNED WITH ANOTHER IMPOSSIBLE MURDER THAT CAN ONLY BE SOLVED BY HIS RECLUSIVE SCOTTISH GENIUS.

The next half of the piece was a review of McTavish’s second book, Knee-Deep in Trouble, in which the reviewer’s tone, after the initial hook, became much more critical. It was clear he was a big enough fan of the first book to not trash the second, but that was about the only thing holding him back from outright savagery. The review concluded that McTavish’s sophomore effort was, in all, a disappointment, and the piece ended with a quick review of two other debut novels, whose authors had appeared on a panel with McTavish at the Edinburgh International Book Festival . . .

I turned to Brooke. “You’re joking?”

She tapped the article in response. I looked back down. A small photograph, just an inch square, was squeezed into the column width between the final two paragraphs. In it were three people, merry at a bar. I recognized all of them.

The caption read: Bestselling crime author Henry McTavish catches up with up-and-coming debut novelists Lisa Fulton (left) and S. F. Majors (right) at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

The photo had been taken in a badly lit booth of a badly lit pub—which I mean literally, as according to my research the owner tried to burn it down for insurance purposes in 2015 and failed—but it was unmistakable. McTavish had his arm around Lisa’s shoulder, they were both laughing, and S. F. Majors was looking dead straight at the camera. All three had foaming pints of beer in front of them and vibrant, unforced smiles. It didn’t seem like they were posing for a newspaper; it had the sense of camaraderie you find in high school yearbooks that makes you wistful for youth.

The three of them, all at the same festival. Twenty years ago. There’s that phrase again. And now all on a train together. I knew not to take it lightly.

“Why are you showing me this?” I asked.

“Because if the best you’ve got is a couple of theories about why I’m capable of murder, I thought you’d want to know who actually had motive to kill him. This”—she stabbed a finger at the page—“was taken right after Henry published Knee-Deep in Trouble, the second Morbund novel, which tanked. And a year before he published . . .” She unspooled it for me.

“Off the Rails,” I finished. The third Morbund novel. What Brooke was trying to tell me clicked in slowly. “That’s the book that Majors brought up at the introductory panel. The one she said was based on real events.”

“Precisely! You see, she has claimed in the past that she first mentioned that story”—with each word, she plugged her finger right on Majors’s toothy grin—“at. This. Exact. Festival.”

I tried to make the picture flicker to life in my imagination. The clinking of glasses, the whispered gossip, the commiseration over reviews, the bashfulness around better-than-expected sales. A room of people who get it. Writing is a dream job, but it is a job, and sometimes it’s nice to be around people who share your opinion that the stakes of paper and ink are life and death. Writing is such a solitary act that a room full of communal misery is a tonic that many won’t admit is quite rejuvenating. Provided they’re not killing each other, of course.

A bunch of writers in a room requires a collective noun that the English language doesn’t have. A condolence, perhaps. A sympathy. It’s a war hospital for the written word.

I thought back to what I’d originally hoped this trip would be, my dream of hitting it off with McTavish. Now I pictured Lisa, McTavish and Majors huddled together, sharing their dreams and inspirations . . . and ideas.

What had Majors said at the panel? What color was Off the Rails? And what had been Henry’s answer, complete with gloating smile? Green.

Jealousy.

“Majors thinks McTavish took her idea for Off the Rails?”

“Bingo,” Brooke said. “She’s never let it go. Says they got to drinking and sharing, and the conversation was fairly casual, a bit creative. You know how it goes—a bit of Who are you reading?, a bit of What are you working on? Then a year and a bit later she sees Henry’s new book hit the shelves.” She mimed a little explosion with her hands.

“How have I never heard about this? I’m not a Mongrel, sure, but I’m enough of a fan to have twigged if any accusations hit the press. How the hell do you know about it?”

“Majors has to be very careful about what she says,” Brooke said. “Wyatt Lloyd has been . . . I don’t want to say ‘threatening,’ but I could say . . . aggressively litigious. Besides, if I told you tomorrow I was going to write a novel about Henry the Eighth, I don’t dibs that story for myself. It’s public, it’s out there, so me writing about it doesn’t rule out anyone else from having a crack. Come to think of it”—she held up a finger in mock thought—“I reckon someone’s been murdered on a train before.”

Something McTavish said rang in my mind. If you knew someone who died or was hurt in a similar way . . .

“Different question, then. Who’s Archibald Bench?”

She burst out laughing. “You’re better off barking up the Annie Wilkes stuff.”

“What?”

“Archie Bench is the reason I wouldn’t have killed him. Try harder.”

“Okay.” I tried again. “Did Majors know the people involved in the real story behind Off the Rails?”

Brooke gave a noncommittal head shake. More of a How should I know than an I don’t know.

I turned back to the article. “You kept this, which means you thought it was important. You had your loyalty, of course, to his books. So you’re predisposed to believe that he hadn’t nicked the idea, I’m guessing. But you believed the rumor all the same?”

Brooke sighed. “Obviously I kept it for a reason. I mean, it’s an important biographical incident, regardless of who you believe. Like any good rumor, it’s not really public knowledge, but it’s not exactly hidden. Most Mongrels know about it, at least. Occasionally it pops up on a podcast. But it’s not, like, news or anything.” This seemed an overexplanation: I’d never heard these accusations before. “And McTavish has always denied it. I always believed him. But . . . you’re right, I did keep the article. And now that I’ve met him . . .” She put a hand on my arm. “You read people’s books, and you think you know them. They’re having a conversation with you for hundreds of pages, and there’s an intimacy there that you develop on your own. I really loved Henry McTavish. And then I got here, and the drinking, the excess, the look in his eyes as he handed me the key . . . Maybe now I think my picture of him was wrong. Maybe now I think he’s a man who likes pleasure but doesn’t want to have to work for it. And maybe that means I wonder if I should have believed her all along.”

I digested that. It seemed a pretty good summation of McTavish—a man who wanted his pleasures gifted to him. Or taken.

“What about Lisa? She hasn’t backed up these claims, has she?” I asked. I recalled Majors almost expecting Lisa to stick up for her at the panel, the disappointment when she hadn’t, and the friction when Lisa’s cover revealed she’d been blurbed by McTavish. That could easily be seen as Lisa choosing a side. Maybe it was even what McTavish had offered her for her silence.

Brooke shook her head, but her eyes looked to the floor.

Royce’s words echoed in my mind—there’s more than one way to get a blurb—until I realized it was too whiny and annoying to be a memory and was actually the real-life Royce, who’d finished searching the other rooms and was leaning against the television casing. He had a smugness to him, like someone who’s cheated on the test and knows all the answers. “You talking about Henry and Lisa? They. Got. It. On,” he sneered. “Henry said she was a real firecracker of a lay.”

Brooke retched at his description.

“Find anything?” I painted on a smile. “Decorum, perhaps?”

“Wouldn’t you love to know. And what’s going on here, interviewing suspects without me?”

“She’s not a very likely suspect,” I said.

“That makes her very likely indeed.” He waggled a finger at me. “You should know this, Ernest: it’s never the least likely, that’s too obvious. It’s got to be the next along.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

“Besides, you probably didn’t notice, but I’m quite sharp. She’s been reading a bloody copy of Misery on the trip.” He postured like it was the most genius observation in the world, then turned back to the hallway. “What’s taking this bloke so long?” A toilet flushed, answering his own question, but he called anyway, “Aaron?”

Brooke turned to me. “Misery’s not about obsession. Not if you look at it from Annie Wilkes’s perspective. It’s got a much simpler theme.” She stood up and, even though Royce wasn’t technically blocking her way to the door, managed to get a shoulder into him as she passed. She held up the Chairman’s Carriage key and said as she placed it on the table, “Never meet your heroes.”

Aaron emerged, patting wet hands on the front of his vest, as the Ghan jolted to a stop. We all swayed in unison with the change of velocity.

“Right,” Aaron said, slapping Royce on the shoulder. “Guess that’s your investigation over. Thank God for the professionals. Welcome to Alice Springs.”

Chapter 16

They made us stay on the train while they unloaded the body. I’d returned to the cabin sheepishly, where Juliette had appraised me, looked at her watch (You’ve been gone awhile) and said, “Had your fill?”

I’d nodded, patted her leg. Path of least resistance.

She might have even believed me had I been able to take my eyes off the paramedics, grunting as they carried McTavish’s rag doll body, zipped into plastic, down the steps and onto the platform. It was so mundane, so practical, no more the handling of a celebrity corpse than it was hauling a washing machine up a flight of stairs. I’ve always thought I write things down to help remember them. But there is a part of me that writes to be remembered. Watching them wrestle with the body, I realized that it doesn’t matter how many names on how many spines of how many books you have, sometimes your legacy boils down to meat in a black plastic bag.

I was about as determined to enjoy myself in Alice Springs as Juliette was determined to distract me from thinking about McTavish. The writers’ panels were mercifully canceled for the day, which meant that we had our choice of the activities provided to the regular guests or could simply wander the township on our own. Juliette and I elected to do the latter (Majors told me where to get the best vanilla slice), and then Juliette insisted on joining the bus for a bushwalk to Simpsons Gap, a natural marvel where steep red-rock cliffs had been cleft by weather and time to leave a ravine. I had hoped to bail up Simone with a couple of questions, but I overestimated her proclivity for sightseeing; she’d elected to stay on the train (the bar, we were told, had reopened). In any case, I was quickly taken by the towering view and deep ochre of the rock against the crisp blue of the sky, and promptly forgot all ideas I had about questioning anyone.

I sat in the sand at a point where the ravine was half in sun and half shaded by the ridge, and Juliette put her head on my shoulder, her face half in light and half in shadow. The rocks in front of us had existed for millions of lifetimes. They would be here when our bones were dust and our books were mulch. We were blips. But two blips are bigger than one blip. I think you know you’re onto a good thing when you can apologize without talking.

It was nice enough that I only kept half an eye on what everyone else was doing.

Harriet and Jasper took selfies like they were on their honeymoon. Wolfgang chose a high-up flat piece of rock and meditated on it. The book club ladies delighted in spotting wallabies. S. F. Majors skipped rocks across a pool of water halfway down the ravine, where Brooke, intrepid with youth, hopscotched rock to rock as far along the water’s edge as she could. Lisa hung back in the shade, telling Brooke to be careful, and, later, helping to apply aloe vera cream to Brooke’s one-armed burn. Royce was by the table of drinks the staff had set out, pounding beers. Cynthia kept an eye on us, occasionally yelling how long we had left.

I spotted Harriet and Jasper struggling to get a selfie that captured the whole ravine and walked over to them. “Take your photo?” I asked. “I assure you I’m a well-trained Instagram boyfriend—there’ll be plenty of backup shots. And even retakes without complaint.”

Harriet laughed and excitedly handed me the camera. The photos came out well, although I noticed their smiles were a little too tight. Lips fresh from argument. I could tell Harriet wanted me to try again, but Jasper wouldn’t let her.

I walked away slowly, just to eavesdrop.

“It’s a lot of money,” Jasper said. “I can’t just say no.”

“We don’t need it,” Harriet said.

“Did you pay for this trip? Trust me. We could use it.”

Harriet didn’t like that. She sulked off toward the bar. Jasper followed, chanting her name: “Harriet! Harriet?! Harriet?” It was a familiar trifecta to anyone in a long-term relationship, each inflection meaning something different: Come on; Seriously?; I’m sorry!

Wyatt hadn’t joined us on the trip. I’d last seen him on the platform yelling into his phone; I supposed there was some paperwork to do when an author died. Douglas had also elected to stay behind.

I didn’t think of the murder, or of Douglas, again until we pulled in, pink-cheeked and sun-drunk—except for Royce, who was drunk-drunk—and I spotted Douglas hurriedly walking along the platform. It was no coincidence for us to be there at the same time: we’d been told to be back at the train by five P.M. At first I assumed that Douglas was worried about being late. But then I noticed his head was swiveling, checking to see if he was being followed. I watched as he reached a trash can, spun his backpack around and, with one last head-check, moved an object from his bag into the bin. Almost in the same motion he was walking away.

I looked around the coach. People were chattering and jovial, buoyed by the excursion. Juliette was asleep on my shoulder. I was the only one who had seen it.

We disembarked and I made an excuse to divert toward the bin, faking blowing my nose into a tissue and hoping Juliette didn’t notice I’d skipped two closer receptacles. Inside the bin were the usual scattered food wrappers and empty water bottles, apple cores and banana peels, but in the middle was a folded newspaper. It seemed an odd object to dispose of so suspiciously. I leaned into the bin and unfolded it.

It surprised me to see a murder weapon.

Not the murder weapon, of course. But one that could have only been brought onto the train with murderous intent in mind.

Wrapped up in the middle of the paper was a gleaming silver revolver.