Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

While the train is stopped at Manguri, Ernie describes Coober Pedy: An opal mining town surrounded by miles of abandoned mine shafts, it’s located in a searingly hot region, and many residents live in underground homes. A Land Cruiser pulls up, and Detective Hatch boards the train. Ernie sneaks down the corridor to the bar car, where Hatch and Aaron are talking. Hatch introduces himself and says that he’d like to talk to Ernie. He confirms Ernie’s theory about McTavish’s death being a heroin overdose. Hatch seems to want him to confirm the possibility that Wyatt was killed before the train left Alice Springs, but based on the freshness of Wyatt’s wounds, Ernie thinks it’s unlikely. After a while, Ernie realizes that Hatch is patronizing him and playing along with Ernie’s idea of himself as a detective so that he’ll cooperate. When Ernie stresses that a killer is aboard and that he’s just trying to help, Aaron tells him that the killer was already arrested in Alice Springs. Horrified, Ernie realizes that they’ve arrested Juliette.

Hatch points out that Juliette had Simone’s scarf, which was found with Wyatt’s body. He refuses to believe Ernie’s story about Wyatt finding the scarf. Filled with blind faith in Juliette, Ernie suddenly realizes that, unlike golden-age detectives who solve crimes simply because they enjoy a puzzle, he now has a real motive to solve this crime. He sees how selfish his motives have been up to this point. When Ernie sees someone sitting in Hatch’s vehicle outside the train, he makes a split-second decision. He goes to the bar car and sneaks a quick look to confirm that McTavish’s manuscript is missing and then runs to the back of the train. After reaching the smoking deck, he jumps over the rail to the track below.

As the Ghan pulls away, leaving him in the desert, Ernie runs back down the track toward the Land Cruiser, which Fulton is trying to hot-wire. As Ernie draws close, Fulton takes off on foot. Chasing her into the opal fields, Ernie slides into an open mine shaft. As he desperately tries to hold onto the edge and avoid falling all the way to the bottom, he hears footsteps. Thinking of Juliette alone in her cell, he loses his grip and falls.

At the last second, Fulton grabs his wrist and hauls him out. She tells him that she couldn’t let him fall into the mine to die because she isn’t a killer. Ernie says that he believes her and knows the truth: that McTavish raped her in Edinburgh in 2003. Fulton says that she begged Majors to back her story up afterward, but Majors refused, and it was her word against McTavish’s. In the end, after her only physical evidence against McTavish—his DNA under her nails—was lost in a lab error, Fulton signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) in exchange for money. Ernie tells her that he figured it out because of the revenge stunt Wyatt pulled to get back at her for switching publishers: He had McTavish blurb her book with a phrase that he knew would trigger her memories of the rape (“A firecracker”).

When Fulton confronted McTavish and said that she planned to break the NDA, McTavish tried to buy her off with the $25,000 check, which she burned. Ernie knows that the bruise on her arm couldn’t have come from McTavish, however, because of his car accident injuries. He tells Fulton that he believes she headbutted McTavish and then gave herself the bruise so that she could claim self-defense. What she was after was one of the bloody tissues so that she could do a paternity test: Brooke is the child that resulted from McTavish’s rape. She stole the manuscript and absconded with it to protect Brooke’s financial interests, hoping to discover the real killer before anyone caught up with her.

As they walk back to the Land Cruiser, Ernie tells Fulton that he guessed Brooke was her daughter in part because of Brooke’s one sunburned arm: Based on the way the train is configured, if Brooke were in a guest cabin, it would have been her left arm that was burned, but the fact that it’s her right arm tells him that she is in one of the writers’ cabins. Other clues were Brooke’s behavior regarding McTavish and Fulton’s maternal treatment of Brooke. Fulton confesses that she told Brooke about what happened to Majors in Edinburgh because she was trying to protect Brooke from her own fantasies about her father. Unfortunately, it didn’t work, and when Brooke found out about the festival aboard the Ghan, they argued about whether Brooke should go and try to meet McTavish. Fulton then finally told her daughter about the rape, but Brooke didn’t believe her.

Fulton finally succeeds in hot-wiring the car, and they head for the Ghan. Fulton assures Ernie that Brooke isn’t the killer, but Ernie thinks that Brooke has plenty of motive. He also thinks that, deep down, Fulton suspects her daughter and fled the train to try to divert suspicion onto herself. She’s trying to use his book to send a message to Brooke so that she’ll understand her mother’s efforts to protect her. He also suspects that Brooke’s attempts to deflect suspicion onto Majors are an attempt to protect her mother because Brooke also wonders if her mother was the killer. Before he prepares to jump for the train, Ernie asks whether the story Majors told that night in Edinburgh was exactly as it happened or a slightly fictionalized version of that story. Fulton says that it was the latter.

Fulton steers the car up onto the tracks and approaches the train from behind. Ernie is relieved when the train slows slightly. He climbs onto the hood of the car and begins to creep toward the platform at the back of the train. His phone rings. Thinking it may be Juliette, he answers. It’s Andy. Andy says that the purpose of the burglary turned out to be gathering poppies for opium. Just before he makes the jump onto the train, Ernie tells Andy that his thief is most likely the very killer Ernie is chasing. Ernie jumps, crashes against the rail, and hangs on for dear life. He glances back and sees Fulton standing beside the Land Cruiser: The Ghan has come to a complete stop. Fulton and Ernie both board the train.

Ernie directly addresses the readers, saying that he has solved the mystery and is about to gather everyone for a denouement—but he’ll do it properly, unlike Royce. He encourages readers to pause for last guesses about who the killer is and provides an updated list of how many times he has used each suspect’s name.