Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

“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.