https://cluesandculprits.com/ New Clues & Culprits cases every day: Easy, Medium and Hard, plus an Evil case on Sundays. en https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-25/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-25/easy/Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Harrowgate Hall charity bridge drive raised £20,000 for the cottage hospital's new wing. One pair won every rubber for six hours straight and handed the prize cheque to the hospital board. The hospital has yet to see a penny of it. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-25/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-25/medium/Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTActing on a tip-off, customs officers searched the Alpine Night Express from end to end for two hundred smuggled Swiss watches. They found nothing but a dining car that smelled wonderfully of fresh bread, and waved the train across the border an hour late. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-25/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-25/hard/Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTFor a month the Sunday Herald has printed the private notes of a famous footballer recovering on Ward 6 of St. Ursula's: his blood pressure, his diet, his secret fondness for jelly. Only the staff on Ward 6 can read his chart. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-25/evil/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-25/evil/Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTTwo thousand numbered plastic ducks were tipped off the bridge for the Thornbury fête's charity duck race. Duck 1,417 won by thirty yards, crossing the line before most of the others had cleared the bridge. Its owner collected the £5,000 prize, and the pub took a remarkable amount in side bets. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-24/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-24/easy/Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTOne night in late September, four tonnes of prize Pinot grapes were picked from the hillside at Château Verlaine — every bunch, every row. By morning the only trace was a single pair of secateurs and an empty wheelbarrow. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-24/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-24/medium/Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTAll summer, very wealthy guests paid £10,000 each for a secret midnight 'keeper experience' at Larchmont Zoo — breakfast with the gorillas, a swim with the sea lions. The zoo found out when its silverback was spotted wearing a diamond bracelet. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-24/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-24/hard/Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTStarlight Express, the 2–1 favourite for the Countess Stakes, walked out of the stalls, ambled thirty yards and lay down on the turf for a nap. By teatime the horse was perfectly well. The bookmakers' losses were not. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-23/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-23/easy/Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTAt 11:52 p.m. a high roller collapsed at the Silver Ace's private table, and the casino's medic fought for twenty minutes to revive him. He made a full recovery in the ambulance. The £400,000 in chips stacked in front of him did not. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-23/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-23/medium/Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTLionel Ashworth-Bray flew 912 times last year, earning a lifetime of free flights, endless champagne and a loyalty card made of actual gold. Airport records show he never once left the country. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-23/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-23/hard/Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTTickets for the Wren Playhouse revival of 'The Duchess Returns' sold out in four minutes and reappeared online at ten times the price. On opening night two hundred seats sat empty — their tickets unsold even at the new price. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-22/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-22/easy/Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe overnight sleeper to Vienna carried one sad piece of cargo: a coffin going home for burial, its paperwork in perfect order. Somewhere after Salzburg, the coffin's occupant climbed out, changed into a suit and ordered a coffee in the dining car. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-22/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-22/medium/Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTSixty patients were due to receive the first doses of a promising new heart drug at St. Brannoc's, chosen by lottery from four thousand applicants. The hospital has found that eleven of the sixty 'winners' never applied at all. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-22/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-22/hard/Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTFor a year Thornbury has received anonymous letters, on lilac paper and in green ink, revealing everybody's secrets — and villagers have been leaving a 'fee' under the church doormat to stop the next one. Every letter was posted from the village's own postbox. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-21/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-21/easy/Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTLarchmont Zoo announced the sad death of Kiko, its rare okapi, from old age. A month later Kiko — easy to recognise by a scar shaped like a question mark — was photographed grazing in a billionaire's private garden in Monaco. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-21/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-21/medium/Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Goldmoor Gold Cup ended in a photo finish, and the judges' photograph showed Copper Lane winning by a nostril. Three days later a spectator's video, shot from nearly the same angle, showed the other horse a full head in front. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-21/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-21/hard/Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTOver eighteen months, two hundred small objects — rings, coins, Roman hairpins — vanished from the Ashcombe Museum's storerooms without a single alarm. Not one of them left through the loading bay. All of them, it turns out, left wearing a coat. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-20/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-20/easy/Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTOn Friday evening, eleven flights into Halston Airport were kept circling for forty minutes 'due to congestion' that radar records show never existed. One plane that landed on time in the confusion was carrying three suitcases of undeclared gold. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-20/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-20/medium/Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTOn the opening night of 'The Lighthouse Keeper's' rival, the Wren Playhouse chandelier dropped six feet onto an empty stage during the overture, and the show was cancelled. The theatre's insurers paid nothing — the policy had been changed the week before, and the new beneficiary is a playwright. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-20/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-20/hard/Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTHours before the ambassador was due to address the summit, her speech — announcing a surprise trade deal — was leaked word for word to a rival delegation, which promptly announced the same deal first. The only copy was locked in the embassy safe. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-19/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-19/easy/Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTPaintings by the reclusive artist Hal Brenner, unseen in public for twenty years, began selling in Mayfair galleries for £50,000 apiece. Brenner, it turns out, has been a patient at St. Brannoc's since 2019 — and hasn't held a brush in all that time. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-19/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-19/medium/Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThornbury's village green has belonged to the parish since 1601. Last week a supermarket chain arrived with planning permission, bulldozers and a deed of sale signed by 'the Thornbury Green Trust' — a body nobody in the village had ever heard of. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-19/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-19/hard/Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThree days out of Reykjavík, the MS Borealis swerved to avoid an iceberg no other ship on the North Atlantic had reported, and spent an unplanned day in the tiny duty-free port of Skálavík. The passengers spent £2 million there. The ship's officers, it emerges, own most of the shops. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-18/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-18/easy/Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTMoonlit Hope, a mare who had never finished better than ninth, won the Ashby Handicap by eleven lengths at odds of 66–1. Two hours later, out in the rain, her four white socks began to run. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-18/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-18/medium/Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Ashcombe Museum's blockbuster 'Lost Masterpieces of the North' drew three hundred thousand visitors and glowing reviews. On its final day, a schoolboy pointed out that one 'seventeenth-century' portrait showed a woman wearing a wristwatch. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-18/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-18/hard/Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe 'Midnight Mirage' sequel spent £9 million on catering during a four-month shoot — enough, the auditors calculated, to give every member of the crew a lobster at every meal. The crew remembers mostly sandwiches. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-18/evil/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-18/evil/Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTCircus Fantasia's acrobatic trio won the television contest 'Big Top Star' and its £1 million prize with 2.3 million phone votes — more than the show had ever received for any act, and nearly all of them cast from within a mile of the circus field. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-17/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-17/easy/Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT'The Lighthouse Keeper' won the city's audience vote for Best New Play by eleven thousand votes — remarkable, given that the Wren Playhouse seats four hundred and the play ran for only three weeks. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-17/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-17/medium/Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTAfter nine days of talks, two governments signed a treaty sharing the fishing rights of a northern sea. When the lawyers compared the two language versions, one of them gave the entire catch to a single company — a company nobody at the table admitted to having heard of. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-17/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-17/hard/Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTHalfway through the Thea Marlow show, every model on the catwalk began, discreetly and then far less discreetly, to scratch. By midnight the collection was a laughing stock, and Marlow's investors pulled out the next morning. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-16/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-16/easy/Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThornbury's prize marrow weighed in at 61 kilos, smashing the county record and winning £5,000 for the village hall. The judges have now been told it was grown in a polytunnel in Kent and driven over in a horsebox at dawn. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-16/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-16/medium/Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTOn the last night of every voyage, the SS Aurora holds a charity auction for an orphanage in Valletta, and passengers bid generously after dinner. Last month a journalist went looking for the orphanage. It is a car park. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-16/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-16/hard/Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTFor a whole term, students on Staircase Nine reported a grey lady drifting past their doors at midnight, and the college closed the staircase 'for structural reasons'. This month a tourist left a five-star review of her stay there: 'Charming, historic, a little haunted.' https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-15/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-15/easy/Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Ashcombe Museum's 1690 astronomical clock went to the conservation studio for its first service in a century. It came back ticking beautifully. On Sunday it predicted an eclipse that won't happen for another four hundred years. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-15/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-15/medium/Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT'Midnight Mirage' won its writer the Golden Lens for best original screenplay. On Friday a retired postman in Hull published the novel he wrote in 1987 — and the film's dialogue appears in it, word for word, on 212 of its 240 pages. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-15/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-15/hard/Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTAll summer, the box office at Circus Fantasia gave change in crisp twenty-pound notes. Every one of them was a forgery — printed, the police now believe, somewhere inside the big top itself. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-14/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-14/easy/Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTDiplomatic bags cannot be opened, x-rayed or weighed by customs. The embassy of a small Alpine principality sent forty-one of them home last month — more than in the previous ten years combined — and every one of them clinked. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-14/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-14/medium/Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTFor the finale of Maison Vey's 'Ice' show, every model wore real diamonds lent by Rennard & Sons. When the jewels went back to the vault that night, the finest necklace of them all — the Snow Queen — turned out to be paste. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-14/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-14/hard/Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTFor six weeks, every customer who used the cash machine outside Bellwether's Fleet Street branch had their card copied. Nobody noticed a thing — partly because, for those same six weeks, the best busking duo in London was playing right beside it. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-13/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-13/easy/Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTAt midnight in the mid-Atlantic, the SS Aurora's alarm sounded: a millionaire passenger had gone over the rail. After a nine-hour search he was declared lost at sea, and the life-insurance claim was paid within a month. On Tuesday he was photographed buying ice cream in Lisbon. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-13/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-13/medium/Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTNinety seconds into the Founders' Boat Race, St Ives College's eight sank gracefully in the middle of the river, and Hartwell won by a distance. The St Ives boat had been holed with exactly eight small drill holes — one beneath each rower's seat. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-13/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-13/hard/Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTIn the ninety-third minute of the derby, the referee awarded Ashgate a penalty for a foul that every replay shows never happened. In the same minute, bets on a late Ashgate penalty in one small overseas market jumped a hundredfold. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-12/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-12/easy/Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThree weeks before release, the secret ending of 'Midnight Mirage' leaked online with photographs from the set, and the film's opening weekend broke every record. The studio swore it would find the leaker. The leaker, it turns out, wrote the ending. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-12/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-12/medium/Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTCircus Fantasia's three old lions died of 'a sudden fever' in a single week and were cremated before any outside vet could see them. Last night a wildlife sanctuary in Portugal posted a video of three new arrivals with very familiar scars. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-12/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-12/hard/Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe night before Quiver Labs' first independent audit, a burst pipe flooded its server room and wiped six years of financial records. The pipe, the plumbers say, was cut cleanly with a hacksaw. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-11/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-11/easy/Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTTwo hours before the Maison Aurel show in Paris, its entire autumn collection went on sale online at a twentieth of the price, from a website registered that morning. Not one garment had yet been seen by the public. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-11/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-11/medium/Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTOn Saturday night an ambulance, lights flashing, parked outside Bellwether's Moorgate branch for six hours to attend a collapsed man nobody else ever saw. On Monday morning, forty safe-deposit boxes in the basement were found open — from below. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-11/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-11/hard/Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTLast week the Grand Meridian's reviews filled overnight with photographs of bedbugs, and the value of the hotel halved. On Friday it was bought at the new low price by two tycoons who had been trying to buy it for years. The bedbugs, it turns out, were all the same bedbug. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-11/evil/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-11/evil/Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTFor a month, the Lantern's photographs of a black panther prowling Hampstead Heath doubled its sales and emptied the city's parks at dusk. Yesterday the 'panther' was found asleep in a garden in Highgate. It is a Great Dane called Duchess, recently dyed jet black. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-10/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-10/easy/Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThree candidates for Hartwell College's most competitive scholarships gave flawless interviews in December. In June, none of the three could find the college, the library or, in one case, their own staircase. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-10/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-10/medium/Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTHalfway through the centenary match, Ashgate Rovers' 1926 league trophy was lifted from its glass case in the players' tunnel. Forty thousand people were inside the stadium. Not one of them saw it go. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-10/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-10/hard/Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTLast month the privately funded Ares rover sent home photographs of a frozen waterfall on Mars, and its backers raised another $400 million on the strength of them. This morning a hiker in Iceland recognised the waterfall. It's in Iceland. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-09/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-09/easy/Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTEvery night of its spring tour, Circus Fantasia's audiences laughed until they cried — and drove home lighter. In six weeks, 412 wallets, watches and phones vanished from the stands, always in the second half, and never from anyone seated near the ring. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-09/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-09/medium/Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTQuiver Labs pays £10,000 to anyone who reports a security flaw in its app. In twelve months it paid out £1.9 million to two hundred 'independent researchers' who were remarkably good at finding the same kind of mistake. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-09/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-09/hard/Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Rosa Pass chairlift carries skiers from Switzerland into Italy and back. For two seasons, Swiss watches worth €14 million have been turning up in Milan without passing through a single customs post. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-08/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-08/easy/Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTFor nine years, every account at Bellwether Savings lost a fraction of a penny each night — far too little for anyone to notice. A retired customer who balances her own books to four decimal places finally did, and the fractions add up to £3.1 million. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-08/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-08/medium/Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTAt 2:15 a.m. a fire alarm emptied the fourth floor of the Grand Meridian, where an entire wedding party was asleep. There was no fire. When the guests came back up from the street in their dressing gowns, thirty-one room safes stood open and empty. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-08/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-08/hard/Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTFor a decade the Daily Lantern has been famous for the scandals it broke. This week a former cabinet minister revealed it was even better at the scandals it didn't break — and that he had paid £80,000 a year for the privilege. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-07/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-07/easy/Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTOn cup final day, three thousand fans arrived at Ashgate Park holding tickets that scanned green at the turnstiles. Inside, they found someone already sitting in every one of their seats. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-07/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-07/medium/Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTMission control's prize exhibit, a fist-sized moon rock lent by the national museum, has been the star of three thousand school trips. On Monday a geologist on one of those trips noticed that it was a lump of Cornish granite, painted grey. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-07/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-07/hard/Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTAt a candlelit séance in Morrow Hall, the spirit of the late Sir Arthur Morrow told his widow to sell the family's racehorses to a wine merchant for a single pound. She signed the papers before the candles had been blown out. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-06/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-06/easy/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTQuiver Labs raised £40 million on a demo of Oracle, an AI that answered any question in flawless prose within a second. Today a visiting investor asked it what it had eaten for lunch. Oracle replied: 'A cheese sandwich, thanks for asking.' https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-06/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-06/medium/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTCelia Varga, heir to a shipping fortune, vanished on the black run above the village at dusk, and by midnight her family had paid a €5 million ransom into an account in Cyprus. Three days later she skied back into the village, sunburnt, cheerful, and with no memory of where she had been. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-06/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-06/hard/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTChâteau Morel's modest rosé won the Grand Concours in a blind tasting, beating wines ten times its price. Two judges have since admitted they could have sworn they were drinking a 2015 Clos Saint-Aurèle — which, as it turns out, is exactly what was in their glasses. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-05/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-05/easy/Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTDuring three days of merger talks at the Hotel Meridian, the pianist in the Palm Court played the same Chopin nocturne forty-one times. Somewhere in those forty-one performances, every figure from the sealed boardroom upstairs reached a rival bidder. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-05/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-05/medium/Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTFor three weeks the Lantern's Saturday crossword has been unusually hard and unusually popular — with sixteen-year-olds. This morning the national exam board noticed that its maths answers had appeared in print, clue by clue, the day before every paper. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-05/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-05/hard/Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTIn one night of baccarat at the Silver Ace, two high rollers won £1 million without losing a single hand they bet big on. The cards were inspected, the shoe was X-rayed and the dealer was searched down to his socks. Everything was clean. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-04/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-04/easy/Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTNinety seconds before lift-off, the Halcyon-3 launch was scrubbed for a sensor fault nobody can now find. In those ninety seconds Halcyon's shares fell by a third, and somebody who had bet heavily on exactly that fall became very rich. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-04/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-04/medium/Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe late Lord Ashby left Wexcombe House to whichever guest solved his treasure hunt by Sunday noon. A wine merchant nobody had heard of solved it in four hours flat — clue after clue, as if he had read the answers before the envelopes were opened. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-04/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-04/hard/Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Danube Star sells murder-mystery weekends: actors, a pretend corpse, a prize for the best amateur sleuth. On Saturday's run the man playing the corpse woke up in a siding in Linz — and the train safe, full of passengers' passports and jewellery, was empty. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-04/evil/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-04/evil/Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTMadame Yvette Laroche went into theatre at Queen Adelaide Hospital wearing the Laroche emerald, which she swore she would never take off. She woke without it. Her insurers have been asked for £2 million, and not one hospital camera saw a thing. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-03/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-03/easy/Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe ice swan at the Chalet Edelweiss gala was meant to melt by midnight. At 11:40 someone wheeled it out into the snow, and by dawn the Kessler rubies — stolen in Milan last week — had crossed the Alps without passing a single customs post. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-03/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-03/medium/Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTChâteau Verlaine announced it had found two hundred forgotten bottles of its legendary 1947 in a bricked-up cellar, and they sold at auction for €3 million. This morning the buyer's laboratory found grapes in them that weren't planted on the estate until 1983. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-03/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-03/hard/Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe breeding programme at Larchmont Zoo produced six hyacinth macaw eggs this spring, the rarest clutch in Europe. The records say all six were infertile and destroyed. A private collector abroad says otherwise — and has six bright blue chicks to prove it. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-02/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-02/easy/Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe first edition of the Evening Clarion announced the mayor's resignation. The second edition, forty minutes later, did not — and in between, someone collected £60,000 from bookmakers who had taken bets on exactly that. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-02/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-02/medium/Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTOver twenty-eight nights, the second roulette wheel at the Silver Ace landed on seventeen almost twice as often as it should. The house lost £1.3 million to a shifting crowd of strangers — and the wheel, when the inspectors took it apart, was perfect. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-02/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-02/hard/Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTAt 6:40 p.m. a flash mob of dancing travellers brought Terminal 2 to a joyful standstill for nine minutes. At 6:49, a crate of Byzantine icons in transit to a museum in Oslo was found missing from the secure cargo hall — two floors below the dancing. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-01/easy/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-01/easy/Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTOvernight at Fenwick Abbey, the portrait of the Second Duchess grew a crack it never had — because the canvas on the wall is no longer the one painted in 1781. The household's painting retreat ends at noon, and the original is still somewhere on the estate. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-01/medium/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-01/medium/Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTAt 3:12 a.m. the Sud Express stopped dead in a tunnel beneath the Pyrenees, and for eleven minutes nobody could say why. When it moved again, a sealed mailbag of uncut diamonds bound for Paris had been emptied of every stone. https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-01/hard/https://cluesandculprits.com/p/2026-10-01/hard/Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTFor six weeks, Room 9 of St. Brannoc's private wing has housed a very ill, very wealthy patient: meals delivered, drugs dispensed, insurer billed £400,000. This morning a new night nurse opened the door. The bed had never been slept in.