The Last Toast
Seasoned — two halves that must both be in the file before it will stand.
Sir Edmund Vale was found dead in his study at twenty past ten last night. The surgeon says poison, and says he took it between twenty and forty minutes before he died.
There is a half finished whisky on the desk beside him. It has been tested. There is nothing in it.
The storm took the road out at seven and it has not come back. Nobody has left this house since dinner and nobody has come to it. There were five people under this roof last night and they are all still under it.
So the question is not who could have reached him. They all could. The question is what Sir Edmund Vale swallowed between twenty to ten and ten o'clock, and who put it in front of him.
Who is in the house
- Charles Harcourt — Partner in Vale and Harcourt, twenty-two years
- Dr James Mercer — Physician to the family, nineteen years
- Arthur Vale — Sir Edmund's son, twenty-seven
- Eleanor Vale — Lady Vale
- Clara Finch — Housemaid at Ashcombe, two years
You may take 4 of them into the interrogation room. Choosing which is most of the game.
Where you are
Ashcombe, a country house cut off by a storm, on a night in November 1932. The drawing room, the study, and the passage between them.
The dead: Sir Edmund Vale.
Where it comes from
Grounded in R v Christiana Edmunds, Central Criminal Court, January 1872. The Brighton chocolate cream poisonings, 1871. Read the original. The case is original; the story it learns from is not.