Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Writing out my preposterous hopes for the journey here gives me the same shameful chill as seeing old social media photos—Did I really post that?—not least because of the horrifically cliché Scottish brogue I’d superimposed onto McTavish before I’d even met him. I think it’s obvious that McTavish and I would not wind up on a first-name basis. Though my inspiration would still come from a drink with him, in a way, so maybe I’m clairvoyant after all.

Also, I’m aware that my motivation only adds up to three quarters—half financial, a quarter creative—as my sharp-eyed editor has duly mentioned. She’s similarly pointed out that my number of writers doesn’t match those on the train—I said seven will board—but that’s, like, a whole thing. Juliette’s a writer too, remember. I promise I can add. I’ve always found fractions a little more difficult, but trust me, we’ll get to the other quarter.

Simone was still surveying the crowd for her other client. Around a hundred people were milling about on the platform, but I couldn’t tell which were the writers, or, given the festival was only using a few of the carriages, even the difference between the festival punters and the regular tourists. The staff, who were all wearing red-and-white striped shirts and camel-emblazoned polar-fleece vests, had started shepherding different groups of people to different areas of the platform. A young woman, shy enough of twenty to not look it in the eye, was panting and running her palms down her front as if they were steam irons, in the midst of apologizing to a man I assumed was her supervisor by the way he looked at his watch. I couldn’t hear the apology, but groveling has a universal sign language.

A hostess with a clipboard approached us.

“Cunningham,” I said, watching her pen trawl the list of names.

Simone gave hers over my shoulder, but then added, “It might be under Gemini’s rooms, though.”

“Cabin O-three,” Clipboard said to me. “Easy to remember: it’s oxygen!”

“Ozone,” I offered instead, given that oxygen was actually O₂.

“Correct, you are in the O zone!” Clipboard chirped.

Behind me, Juliette disguised a laugh as a sneeze. Clipboard either didn’t notice or didn’t care; she pointed her pen at Simone and said, “P-one. But enter through O. I’ll warn you though, it’s a bit of a leg,” before scurrying off to the next group.

“I’ll see you later.” Simone waved us away, her head still on a swivel.

“I think the warning about the distance was for the older clientele,” I suggested as Juliette and I strode over to the nearest carriage. We were among the youngest there by a couple of decades. “We can handle walking the length of a train.”

I was quickly humbled. The carriage in front of us was marked A. To our right, the iconic red engine cars, two huge locomotives. To our left, the train bent away so I couldn’t even see the end. I put it down, incorrectly, to curvature over distance: I was about to learn that the train ran to nearly a kilometer. So our walk was one of slowly creeping dejection, as we passed seven more carriages—including luggage, crew, restaurant and bars—and weren’t even a vowel ahead.

Around G, a throaty growl thrummed in the air, and for a second the fear that the train was leaving kicked us into a jog. Then I saw a green Jaguar cut across the car park and over the curb, parking directly alongside the train, gouging thick rivets in the grass. Given the indulgence, I expected Henry McTavish to step out, but instead a spindly-limbed man emerged. He had hair that was impossibly both wild and balding, fairy floss in a hurricane, and a long, thin frame that made his movements angular and jerky, like he belonged in one of those old-fashioned clay stop-motion films. I decided he looked like the type of character who owns a gas station and tells the nubile young holiday-goers that there’s a shortcut through the desert, imminent cannibals and various other nasty murdering sorts be damned, and said as much to Juliette.

“That’s Wolfgang, actually. And I think he’s going more for eccentric genius than lecherous imp,” she said.

That did twig some recognition. Wolfgang—singular, like Madonna, Prince or even Elmo—was the prestige writer of the group, the one who’d been short-listed for the Commonwealth Book Prize. Pedigree aside, I’d been surprised he was appearing at the festival as his books didn’t generally sit in the crime genre. I supposed his rhyming verse novel retelling of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was his qualification.

“Clearly his books do all right,” Juliette added, raising an eyebrow as the Jaguar grumbled back off to the road. “Better than ours, anyway.”

I agreed; my royalties were more around the hatchback level. Secondhand.