“I know that,” I said, in a way that made it clear that I didn’t.
Juliette chewed her lip, knowing I was both waiting for and not really asking for her permission. “If you need this—just for you, not for any other reason—then ask some questions. Sure. But just enough to feel comfortable that this is exactly what it looks like. Don’t try and prove that McTavish was murdered. Try and prove to yourself that he wasn’t.”
It feels smug writing this out in retrospect, because, well . . . obviously I have the hindsight and the stab wound to say how wrong she was. But Juliette’s advice was, at the time, really quite good. I found my agitation calming.
“Okay. So it’ll come down to how he died. If it was murder”—I caught her eye—“which I’m not saying it was! But I need to either find or rule out the method.”
“Sounds like a starting point.”
“It must be poison. In his flask?”
“That’s how I’d do it.” Juliette shrugged.
The intercom crackled and Aaron’s voice came on, telling us that we’d be reaching Alice Springs in two hours, and the staff would appreciate it enormously if we could all stay in our rooms until then.
Alice Springs was a rural community, home to about thirty thousand people. Enough for a police station and a morgue. They would take McTavish’s body off the train there. I was on the clock.
I stood up. “I need to see the body.”
“What? Why?”
“To see if he’s been poisoned.”
“And how are you going to tell? You’re not a doctor. You’re not even a detective.”
“Last time—”
“There was an actual doctor with us. This is not the same. You’d need an autopsy, for starters, toxicology tests. Wait for Alice Springs. You need the experts.”
Something McTavish said bounced up inside my brain. If one of the six of us was to die right now, you’d have five suspects who all know how to get away with murder.
Maybe we had experts on the train after all. Five crime writers, each specializing in a different field. Five people who had spent decades researching every way to solve a crime. Or commit one.
I hadn’t even spoken but Juliette started vehemently shaking her head. “No. Ern. That doesn’t count.”
“Hear me out.”
“You need an autopsy. And someone who knows the actual law, otherwise you risk compromising evidence.”
“We’ve got both of those.”
“No, you don’t. These people are writers.”
“Royce used to be a forensic pathologist. Lisa was in law. They’re experts.” I was talking mostly to myself now, ticking off everyone’s qualifications in a rapid mutter. “Forensic thrillers. Legal thrillers. Majors knows criminal psychology—interviews, profiles, that sort of thing. That’ll help. And Wolfgang—well, I suppose literary fiction is a bit useless.”
This is, for the most part, true. Wolfgang’s contributions, except for a stunning bit of literary deduction involving a comma late in the piece, are lackluster.
“And where do you put yourself in this crack crime-fighting team?”
“Well,” I said, a little proudly, “I know the rules.”
At this, Juliette threw up her hands. “If this makes it into the book, I refuse to be a nagging girlfriend. So it feels pointless to remind you, again, that this is real life and no one has to follow any murder-mystery rules. But if you insist on making me a side character, I won’t be a part of this don’t-go-in-there pantomime any longer.” She turned away from me and looked out the window.
Silence is a tap left running: it fills and fills until it overflows and becomes insurmountable.
Honestly, we’d never really fought before. Clothes on the floor and who takes the trash out are small-fry compared to the serial killer we’d fought, and so it had never occurred to us that we possessed any household dramatics worth raised voices. But the cabin was flooded and the felt box in my pocket heavier than ever. This wasn’t in my plan.
If one advantage of writing this out again is to gloat when I am correct, a disadvantage is having to relive when I am wrong. I should have said a lot more in that moment. I should have realized that Juliette wasn’t asking me to not care about McTavish’s death, she was asking me to care about her. That she wasn’t asking me not to go, she was asking me to stay. Those words may seem the same on paper, but they mean very different things.
Those of you hoping I said the right thing next haven’t paid enough attention: my mistakes are voluminous and swift. I’m a double-down kind of guy. So I stood, which was a bad start, as no one likes arguing from a height difference. And then I said the worst possible combination of words (dare I say, not only in this conversation, but in general social terms) I could have chosen:
“I need to talk to Alan Royce.”
Chapter 13
Royce was in the corridor, fist raised, when I opened my door. He wore a frog-faced look of surprise. It took me a second to realize that he hadn’t been magically summoned by my words: he had been just about to knock on my door.
I pushed him back into the hallway and stepped out before Juliette could see him.
“Good timing,” I said, leading without asking. I knew where his room was from putting him to bed last night. “Shall we talk in your cabin?”
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?”