Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

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?”