Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

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?”