Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

“It was no accident. Harriet boarded this train with a plan and a bag full of stolen flowers and was ready to kill with them. But, if I’m honest, I think she was still working up the courage when she got on the train.”

“Sorry, the murder weapon is flowers?” Hatch said.

“Opium poppies can be used to make heroin. You can make a tea with them. They’re grown in Tasmania for pharmaceutical purposes—you can’t buy these kind of flowers in a shop. Addicts often try to steal them to make their own drugs. Of course, you know all this, don’t you, Harriet? What you don’t know is that the person whose poppy farm you stole from was a quaint old lady named Margaret with a penchant for justice and terrible taste in low-budget detectives.”

“Tasmania?” Jasper said, staring at his wife like she was an abstract painting.

“I knew you’d started your trip there,” I said. “You said you’d taken the chance to drive Australia top to bottom while you finished Life, Death and Whiskey. And you accidentally gave Wyatt seasickness pills instead of hay fever tablets. The only way to drive Australia truly top to bottom is to put your car on the ferry across the Bass Strait from Tasmania to the mainland: hence the pills. Wyatt, who had the room next to you, got terrible hay fever on that first day. That’s because your room, your clothes, were coated with pollen from the poppies Harriet had stuffed in her bag. I saw the petals in the corridor too, but I assumed it was some romantic flourish.”

Harriet took a step backward, toward the restaurant carriage. Simone stumbled with the movement, and the jagged edge of the glass drew a longer line of red across her neck.

“I did it for you, Jasper,” Harriet said. “That stupid review I wrote, I saw what it did to you. It snuffed out your ambitions for anything more, made you happy in the shadows of someone else’s career. You know how that makes me feel? Knowing I led you to believe that you were nothing more than another man’s name? I’m sick of seeing my words—peerless . . . ,” she seethed, “unbeatable—on every fucking cover. Those words should have been yours. They are yours. No. I wanted to put it right. You should have your own name. Your own success. Your own legacy.”

“And McTavish was in the way of all of that, wasn’t he?” I said. “Because even though Jasper had tried to finish the series, killing Morbund off, Wyatt was never going to let him out of it. Wyatt didn’t want Life, Death and Whiskey; why accept a Jasper Murdoch novel when he could be getting more McTavishes? And so McTavish had to go to clear Jasper’s way. But that still wasn’t the final straw, was it?”

Harriet shook her head.

“Like I said, you didn’t know if you could go through with it. But the tipping point, the thing that changed you from hypothetical to murderous, is so simple. It’s a beer coaster.”

I remembered Jasper approaching McTavish, introducing himself. McTavish had signed the beer coaster To Jasper Murdoch. Harriet had read it aloud. Wow. That’s a keeper.

“He didn’t even know your name!” Harriet yelled. She maneuvered, forcing Simone to fall in step with her, into the small corridor beside the bar, toward the door to the next carriage.

Jasper, Hatch and I kept gentle pace, one step forward for each of her steps back.

“The things you’ve done for him. The money you’ve made him. And he thinks you’re some fanboy who wants an autograph? An autograph?”

I kept going. “You brewed the opium tea in the little kitchenette at the end of the carriage. That’s why the kettle was in the bin, because you didn’t want anyone else on the train accidentally dosing themselves. You mixed the tea in with a bottle of whiskey—top-shelf stuff, the kind that McTavish wouldn’t be able to resist—and left it in front of his door so he’d see it in the morning, adding an anonymous card: From an admirer. McTavish thought it was from Brooke, whom he’d propositioned the night before, not realizing she was his daughter. That’s why he offered to share it with her that morning, just before he died; he assumed she’d know what he was talking about.”

I’d heard him say to her: It’s a mighty fine drop to drink alone. “Now, you didn’t mean for his murder to be so dramatic. You thought he might have a nightcap, die in his sleep. Or, even better, drink it after the journey, when you wouldn’t even be close to him. Unfortunately, McTavish is an alcoholic. He got stuck in straightaway, filling his flask with it.”

The bottle pressed deeper into Simone’s neck.

“Harry, please—” Jasper said.