The Ratnagiri House
The war had ended decades ago, but the books were never closed.
The scene
Ratnagiri House, a sea-facing mansion on the cliff road north of Panaji, July 1962. The monsoon is in full force, and the flooded cliff road means nobody is leaving until morning. Cyrus Mistry, a retired Bombay shipping magnate, has gathered his niece, his housekeeper of fifteen years, his driver, an old wartime acquaintance, and a visiting journalist for dinner.
The victim
Cyrus Mistry, 64, found collapsed at his study desk, a half-emptied chai glass on the blotter carrying a faint bitter-almond smell. A locked drawer was forced open in the few minutes before the body was found.
The suspects
- Priya Mistry (Niece) — Cyrus raised her after her parents died at sea, and she inherits everything, a fact she has mentioned more than once tonight.
- Colonel Raghav Nair (Old Acquaintance) — Served beside Cyrus during the war years, though the two men have barely spoken warmly in a decade.
- Devika (Housekeeper) — Fifteen years in this house has taught her every one of Cyrus’s habits, and most of his secrets besides.
- Thomas (Driver) — Drove Cyrus to the bank in Panaji twice last week, on errands nobody else in the house was told about.
- Meena Iyer (Journalist) — Came to interview a shipping magnate for a retrospective piece, and leaves, if she leaves at all, with a very different story.
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.
How to read this case
The flood outside means nobody arrived after dinner and nobody left before the body was found, which narrows the case to a short guest list and an even shorter list of who could have been alone with Cyrus in the minutes before his tea went cold. Read the timeline of who excused themselves from the dining room, and when, more carefully than you read anyone’s protest of innocence. The bitter-almond smell tells you how he died; the forced drawer tells you why. Matching the two is the whole case, and the house itself, storm-locked and full of people who have known each other for decades, will not make it easy.
Why play it
The Ratnagiri House is a closed-room mystery in the oldest sense of the phrase: one house, one storm, one night, and a killer who has known the victim far longer than any single guest lets on. It is PLAY INQUEST’s gentlest introduction to the method, contradictions hiding in plain testimony, evidence that only makes sense once you stop trusting anyone’s account of their own evening, but it plays entirely fair. If you like your murder mysteries with a country house, a family fortune, and a monsoon keeping everyone exactly where the killer needs them, start here.
That is as far as any file goes without spoiling it. The rest, the confession, the weapon, the one lie that breaks the whole timeline, is yours to work out in the game.
This handcrafted case is free to play. A Google account is required to open the casebook; today's Daily Dossier can be started without an account.