The Midnight Passenger
Everyone on the train had somewhere to be. None of them wanted to arrive.
The scene
The overnight mail train from Bombay to Goa, October 1962. A first-class compartment in carriage B. The train has stopped for forty minutes at an unmanned junction, half an hour from any town, after a signal fault.
The victim
Harish Mehta, 52, presented to his fellow passengers as a Bombay financier, in fact a special auditor for the Central Bureau of Investigation. Found slumped against the window of his compartment, his whisky flask half-drunk, his briefcase opened and emptied. Cause of death: potassium cyanide, ingested with the whisky.
The suspects
- Mrs. Kamla Desai (Widow)
- Suresh Pillai (Company Lawyer)
- Dr. Vikram Shenoy (Physician)
- Ramu Patil (Conductor)
- Geeta Nair (Journalist)
Every one of them is hiding something, and their alibis form a single shared timeline. Somewhere in it, one statement cannot possibly be true. Find the contradiction and you have found the killer. This is as far as any file goes without spoiling it, the rest is yours to work out.