The Night Desk · Season 2 · Case 49 · Sunday cold case ·
The Diver's Report
Seventeen years ago a diver went down to the Halcyon and came back with a report. Nobody ever heard it read.
The case file
Sunday cold case. On December 13, 1909, the Harbor Board met to hear a diver's report on the wreck of the Halcyon. In the recess before it was read, the report vanished from the chairman's table, and the diver was never hired again. This week a binder, mending the Board's old minute books, found it folded flat and sewn into the spine of the 1909 volume.
In the recess five people were in the building, one each in the boardroom, the clerk's office, the map room, on the back stairs and in the porter's lodge. Each had something a report could go into: the minute book, a chart tube, a dispatch box, a coal scuttle or a carpetbag. All five are living, and one of them is lying.
Who was there
- Cyril Tregenza, then junior clerk, now secretary to the Board. Precise and polite, the keeper of every minute book since 1906.
- Absalom Pethick, the diver, long retired. Eighty, a brass helmet on his mantel, and seventeen years waiting to be heard.
- Mrs. Martha Cundy, porter to the Board, then and now. Keys at her belt, a fire in her lodge, and a memory nobody has ever caught out.
- Nathaniel Kemp, then a member, now chairman of the Board. Silver hair, a dispatch box, and a habit of saying "for the good of the harbor."
- Miss Edith Hender, then the Board's typist, now runs a typing school. Quick eyes, a carpetbag, and sixty words a minute at seventy.
The places: the boardroom, the clerk's office, the map room, the back stairs and the porter's lodge.
The means: the minute book, a chart tube, a dispatch box, a coal scuttle and a carpetbag.
Case 49 · Sunday, December 13
The questioning room
This case's night is Sunday, December 13, from midnight your time. The questioning room plays here with JavaScript on; the case file above reads without it.
The inspector's note: The keeper of the record can hide in it
The safest place to hide a paper is inside the papers nobody reads twice: a bound volume, a ledger, an archive box. Ask who keeps the record and who is expected to carry it. The person whose job is to hold a thing can walk past every searcher with it under their arm and never be asked to open it.
How to solve a Night Desk case, with a worked example.
The solution
The night desk's write-up appears here once you solve the case, or from Monday, December 14, the night after it opens.