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 — and the Berkshire Constabulary have gathered everything a police force gathers and drawn no conclusion from any of it.

What lands on your desk is the file itself: the statements of everyone who was under that roof, the 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 with one another almost everywhere, which is the difficulty — the case is not a gap in the evidence but a seam in it.

You read. You ring the passages that matter, send for the records the police never thought to request, and put the paper you have found in front of the person whose account it contradicts. Then you charge somebody, in your own words, and prosecuting counsel reads the file once before it goes up.

How hard is it?

Sergeant — 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 worked out: witness statements, the surgeon’s report, photographs taken before anything was moved, and the records they thought to send for. You can send for the ones they did not.

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