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Murder on the Midnight Broadcast

Case 007 · 13 August 2026 · Medium

Radio Pelham went on the air at midnight and off again at ten past, in the middle of a sentence. Warren Ives, who owned the station and had come in that night to cancel the midnight show for good, was found inside the locked building with the valves still humming. The doors are locked from the outside after eleven and four people had keys. Who killed him, what did they use, and where were they in those ten minutes?

Suspects

• Grace Mallory

  Producer

  Built the midnight show out of nothing and fought Ives for it at every board meeting. She was heard shouting at somebody at five to twelve and will not say at whom.

  175 cm

• Alice Barnes

  Switchboard operator

  Takes the listeners' calls and writes every one in a book. Between midnight and ten past, her book has no entries and the board was unplugged.

  162 cm

• Philip Stone

  Presenter

  The voice of the midnight show and the tallest man in the building. He kept talking for four minutes after the transmitter went quiet, to an audience of nobody.

  187 cm

• Robert Finch

  Sound engineer

  Keeps a station running on spare parts and grudges. Ives had given his job to a cheaper man, to start on Monday.

  168 cm

Possible weapons

• The steel microphone stand

  A heavy floor stand with a cast base, taken from studio B and found lying in the wrong corridor.

  3.4 kg

• The Bakelite headphones

  Station property, hard as stone, with the headband cracked clean across.

  540 g

• The brass stopwatch

  Used to time every item on air. It stopped at twelve minutes past midnight and nobody restarted it.

  180 g

• The whisky bottle

  From the green-room cupboard, three quarters full, and wiped so thoroughly that not even Ives's prints are on it.

  1.4 kg

Places

• The transmitter room

  In the basement behind a steel door, hot, humming, and the one place where a shout cannot be heard.

  Indoors

• Studio B

  The small studio, unused that night, with its red light off and its door wedged open.

  Indoors

• The record library

  Nine thousand discs on steel shelves, and a card index that shows nothing was borrowed that night.

  Indoors

• The control room

  Glass onto studio A, every fader in reach, and the only clock in the building that is right.

  Indoors

Evidence & statements

1. Whoever was carrying the brass stopwatch is the tallest of the four.
2. Exactly one of these is true, never both: whatever was carried into studio B was heavier than whatever was carried into the control room, or the Bakelite headphones were in studio B.
3. At least one of these is true: whoever had the steel microphone stand is taller than whoever was in the record library, or the brass stopwatch was down in the transmitter room.
4. Grace Mallory was not carrying the steel microphone stand.
5. At least one of these is true: the steel microphone stand was in the transmitter room, or Robert Finch had the brass stopwatch.
6. The blow came from something with a heavy cast base, and there is one of those in the building: the killer is whoever was carrying the steel microphone stand.

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