The Graveyard Files

The Night Porter

Drawer II · Floor Plans

Night duty archive — reopened, autumn 1958.

The Lime Tree, a boarding house on the edge of town. Five deaths in five years. Five full guest lists, five bodies, five times no conviction at all. The files were shut, the house stayed open, and the lamp above the desk went on burning.

Tonight all five folders are on your desk. In each one: a plan of the scene and the statements of everyone present. Where a person was is fixed — and so is where they said they were. Your work: set out on each plan where everyone stood. The last free square is the victim's. Whoever shares an area with the victim is the killer.

Five plans. Five killers. And one name that keeps coming back, in the margin of every file. Watch for it. Write it down. You will need it.

MEMO — CHIEF INSPECTOR WILLIS

Five cases, one address. That is not bad luck, that is a pattern.
Work through the folders in order and build up an evidence file: every case you close yields an exhibit. Five exhibits, one story.
And a word from me — look at what the statements don't say as well.

The Lime Tree

Five files · 1949 – 1954

Evidence file

Final conclusion

Report to Chief Inspector Willis

Five plans, five killers — all of them guests, all of them convicted on your work. But five different killers do not plan the same night five times over. Somebody gave them the keys, the times, the names. Your evidence file lies open on the table: five exhibits, one small and tidy hand. Lay them side by side and fill in the report.

The evidence wall

CASE CLOSED

Epilogue

THE GRAVEYARD FILES · THE NIGHT PORTER · END

How a floor-plan file works

Your object

Find the killer by working out who was in the same area as the victim.

The rules

Every person stands in a different row and a different column.
Beds, chairs and rugs can be occupied; other objects (trees, shrubs, tables, cabinets, crates, barrels, stones) cannot.
The victim occupies the last free square left over. The person in that same area is the killer.

Controls

Tap a portrait and then a square to place that person. Tap a placed person to take them off again.
Turn on ✕ mode to pencil crosses into squares you have ruled out.
Row and column numbers run along the edge of the plan.

Keywords in the statements

alone — nobody else was in the area (not even the victim).

together with — these people were in the same area (possibly with others).

alone with — only these two people were in the area.

beside — directly above, below, left or right, and in the same area.

doorways — the arches in the walls only show how the rooms connect. They play no part in the statements.

corner — a square where two boundaries of an area meet.

row / column — rows count from top to bottom, columns from left to right (see the numbers along the edge).

left of / above — somewhere in a column further left, or a row higher up; the area makes no difference.

the only one on a chair — nobody else was on a chair, the victim included. (The same goes for a rug or a bed.)

exactly N columns/rows from — precisely that distance, in that direction, measured across the whole grid (see the R and C numbers along the edge).

in the [room] — anywhere inside that named area.

area — any named zone with a heavy border round it.