Nothing Was TakenA detective case you solve by reading the file

The case

A man is found dead at his own desk in a Berkshire country house on the ninth of November, 1926. The room is undisturbed. Nothing has been taken: not the money in the drawer, not the silver, not the papers on the blotter. The Berkshire Constabulary gathered everything a police force gathers, and drew no conclusion from any of it.

What lands on your desk is the file itself: the statements of everyone under that roof, the police surgeon’s report, the photographs taken before anything was moved, and the records the county thought to send for. Every person in it can say where they were. Their accounts agree almost everywhere, which is the difficulty. The case is not a gap in the evidence. It is a seam in it.

You read. You circle the passages that matter, request the records the police never thought to, and put what you find in front of the person whose story it contradicts. Then you charge somebody, in your own words, and the prosecutor reads your file once before trial.

How hard is it?

Medium. Two threads that only cross if you read properly. A case runs about an hour, at whatever pace you read.

What is in the file

Everything Berkshire Constabulary gathered and nothing they figured out: witness statements, the police surgeon’s report, photographs taken before anything was moved, and the records they thought to request. You can request the ones they did not.

Questioning is typed, in your own words. There is no dialogue menu. What a witness gives you depends on what you can put in front of them.