Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

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.