Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Coober Pedy is famous for two things. First, the unforgiving heat, which forces much of the one-thousand-person township to live underground. Their houses are burrowed into mountainsides, with rock-walled living rooms like nuclear bunkers from the 1950s. Front doors are either entranceways carved into cliffsides or hatches in the very ground. Surprisingly, given the first, the second thing the town is famous for is not vitamin D deficiency but opal mining. Even more uniquely, given the riches beneath the earth, it’s not entirely overrun by a multibillion-dollar mining conglomerate; rather, it’s largely mined by a mix of industrial operations and hopeful prospectors. Rumor has it the town is filled with secret millionaires who choose to project an exterior of poverty in case people suspect their plots are valuable and move in on their dig.

Opal mining is a simple matter: dig hole, check hole, leave hole. Coober Pedy mandates that mine shafts are to be left open, the mound of excavated dirt left beside the shaft. This serves two purposes: preventing people from falling through an improperly filled mine shaft, and declaring that a site has been explored. The consequence is that the desert is pockmarked with dig sites, mine shafts and mounds of dirt. Though Coober Pedy was nowhere in sight from the station at Manguri, where the train now stood still, these excavations peppered my view like an ever-expanding asteroid belt. Each dig is often only a meter from the next, with drops of varying depths and lethality. So the general guidance is to watch your step. Hence, never walk backward.

I wasn’t in too much danger of falling down a mine shaft, given that we’d been confined to our rooms for the rest of the journey. I didn’t envy Aaron and Cynthia’s duplicates down the other end of the train, where nonfestival guests wouldn’t know about either McTavish’s potential murder or Wyatt’s definite one, and would just be annoyed about having their once-in-a-lifetime trip cut short.

I looked out the window at the thousands of termite-hill mine shaft markers. I was trying to determine, among the many theories, motives and suspects, where the truth was. Solving a crime was much like opal mining. Dig hole, check hole, leave hole. If I’m honest with you, I thought I’d solved enough of it to rule out four suspects by this point, and I needed only a single piece to eliminate the rest. I just had to dig one more hole.

A Land Cruiser four-wheel-drive kicked up a plume of dust, weaving through a track cut between the opal plots, and pulled up alongside the train. The car wasn’t marked as police, and neither was the man who got out, but it was clear that this was either an officer or a detective. He carried a small backpack and wore a wide-brimmed hat that was floppy with regular use, the complete opposite of the straight-from-the-packet tourist gear that Douglas wore. The man wore a beige set of ill-fitting farmer’s clothes and had a moustache thick enough that I figured he’d grown it to stop flies from getting in his mouth. He leaned back through the Land Cruiser’s door and spoke into a two-way radio mounted on the dash, then walked across to the train and rapped on the side of the bar carriage.

The corridor was so silent—the other guests being better at following rules than I was—that leaving my room felt illicit. Having spent three days in motion, rattling tracks underneath us, the quiet was even more profound. Murder seems exciting in fiction, but it’s a roller coaster of adrenaline in real life, and sometimes you need a moment alone. This was the mood of the carriage: everyone withdrawn and reflective.

Cynthia was asleep in the chair outside Wyatt’s room. I tiptoed past her.

In the bar carriage, Aaron was chatting to the police officer when he spotted me. His arm went up immediately, finger pointed. “No,” he said. “No. No. Not this again. Not you. We have professionals now. Back to your room, please.”

“I want to know what’s going on,” I said.

“Is this the amateur detective?” The policeman’s moustache twitched with a smirk. “Who’s been helping out?”

“He’s not helping,” Aaron said firmly. “They’ve been running amok, if I’m honest with you.”

“Ernest.” I crossed the bar and offered the policeman my hand.

He shook it. “Detective Hatch.”

“Please, Detective,” Aaron begged. “This farce has gone on long enough. I don’t think we should be enabling this further.”

“I needed to talk to Ernest at some point, it may as well be now. I’m sure his contributions will be valuable.”

I couldn’t help but puff my chest a little. My contributions would be valuable. Damn right they would be. The detective put one hand on my back and shepherded me into a seat. I could tell, even through my shirt, that he had thick, rough hands. He looked settled, unrushed: I figured he planned to travel with us to Adelaide and then catch the next train back to Manguri to pick up his car.