Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Lisa gave a stiff nod. Brooke held her arm tightly.

“Edinburgh, two thousand and three. McTavish and Lisa did not, as has been attested, have a fling. He raped her.” The silence in the room was thick. “It was your word against his, Lisa. You didn’t stand a chance against the money and power behind McTavish, namely Wyatt. But you had forensics. McTavish’s DNA under your fingernails was supposed to be your proof that you’d tried to fight him off. Until there was a stuff-up, a simple admin error, which meant the evidence was inadmissible. With no one willing to be a witness for you, Wyatt offered you a deal. Some money to stay quiet. Take the check and sweep it under the rug. You accepted because not only did McTavish force himself on you, he fathered your child. Brooke is Henry McTavish’s daughter.”

I’m pleased to report there was a little gasp at this.

“Though you’d never met him, Brooke, you idolized your father through his books. You couldn’t wait to meet him. You didn’t really believe your mother when she tried to warn you away from Henry. And then you got here, and he was everything Lisa had told you he was. It broke your heart.”

“That sounds like much more motive to commit murder than I have,” Royce exclaimed. “Her father, and then the man who helped him get away with it.” He thumbed at his chest. “Inn-oh-cent!”

“I didn’t kill anybody,” Brooke said.

“You have motive, of course,” I replied. “Everyone here does. But if you were the murderer, for those reasons at least, I’d suggest that Royce would probably have been killed by now too.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No, Royce. I’m saying that if someone is killing off people involved in covering up the rape of Lisa Fulton, you’d be a very likely target.”

He squeaked something that sounded like don’t but I was low on pity.

“You were never a full-fledged pathologist, not like it says on your bio. You were an intern in a lab. This was in Edinburgh, right?”

Royce hadn’t told me this directly, but he had bragged that he’d gone to the same university as Arthur Conan Doyle, which is, indeed, the University of Edinburgh. So it wasn’t too much of a leap to guess his internship had been in the same city. “But you had dreams of being a writer. Your work sat unread on publishers’ desks, even though you submitted it four times to Gemini. Until Wyatt picked it up. So along Wyatt comes one day, offering you a book deal that most writers would dream of. And he just wants a little favor. Swap the labels on a couple of vials. That was the deal you struck, wasn’t it? You cover this up for Wyatt, and he publishes you as the next hot new thing. It makes sense: why else would Gemini have changed their mind after four rejections? Your job description would have been in your bio. Wyatt must not have believed his luck. And the timelines work: your first book published in two thousand and four. But now your sales are dropping, Wyatt was losing interest, and you decided a blurb from Henry would fix it. You were humiliated that Henry had endorsed Lisa over you. You told me yourself that McTavish owed you.”

Snot ran out Royce’s nose. I’m not going to bother with his dialogue, but I’ll tell you that blubbering and groveling are suitable descriptions. Between mucus bubbles, he admitted that everything I’d deduced was true. Hatch leaned forward with interest.

Harriet spoke up. “So that’s three people in a secret cover-up, and two of them are dead? And yet Alan isn’t the killer?”

“His big accusation was certainly a distraction,” Wolfgang said. “To do that whole song and dance accusing someone who he knew was actually dead. It would be a way to take the heat off.”

“Thank you both. But Royce didn’t do it. Mainly because he’s a coward. He sides with and hides behind others. This is not a bloke who carries the knife. But destroying a victim’s chance at justice, just for a book deal, that seems pretty cowardly to me.” I looked at Hatch. “You can cuff him now, if you like.”

Hatch held up the cuffs to Royce. “I don’t have jurisdiction for an international crime that may or may not have happened. But it will probably help your cause later if you cooperate now.”

Royce nodded. His arm was al dente as Hatch cuffed him to the chair’s armrest, sitting like it was boneless. He looked resigned to what he knew was coming. I’d say it was a fall from grace, but grace was probably a few stories too many above Royce for him to have a proper splat. The next thing he’d write would be an apology on Twitter, which is a format reserved for the sincerest of apologies.

“Despite his conclusion being wrong, Royce actually laid out some reasonable motives for the rest of you,” I continued. “But, Lisa, this was why he refused to consider you a suspect in his summation.” I recalled her trying to bait him into it: Tell them why I’m a suspect, Alan. “He was discounting a completely viable path of inquiry because he knew that if he unpacked your motive, his involvement could be exposed.”