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Murder in the East Wing

Case 009 · 27 August 2026 · Medium

St Alban's is a quiet private hospital, and the east wing at night is quieter still: four staff, eleven sleeping patients and one locked drug cupboard. At half past two Dr Ronald Sayer, the chief surgeon, was found dead on the floor, a few steps from the nurses' desk. He had spent the week refusing to sign off the ward's missing morphine, and he had told each of the four that he would name a name in the morning. Who killed him, what did they use, and where were they at half past two?

Suspects

• Laura Sims

  Night nurse

  Eight years on nights and she still checks every patient twice. Her signature is on three of the morphine entries that do not add up.

  171 cm

• Anne Whitfield

  Night sister

  Runs the wing, holds the cupboard key on a chain and has never once handed it over. Small, precise, and the last person Sayer spoke to.

  157 cm

• Paul Brennan

  Night porter

  Moves everything that has wheels and knows every back corridor. He was seen carrying something heavy at two, going the wrong way.

  163 cm

• Charles Neave

  Duty doctor

  The tallest man in the wing and the newest. Sayer had blocked his appointment twice and told him so in front of the nurses.

  186 cm

Possible weapons

• The oxygen cylinder

  Steel, half empty, and taken off its trolley. The valve guard is bent and the paint is scraped.

  5.6 kg

• The loaded syringe

  Prepared for a patient who never got it, and found capped and full in a linen bin.

  60 g

• The sandbag from the ambulance

  Kept in the yard as ballast, and the only thing in this building that leaves no mark at all.

  8.2 kg

• The leather doctor's bag

  Brass-cornered, always locked, and heavier that night than its owner can account for.

  2.4 kg

Places

• The night ward

  Eleven beds behind glass, one blue lamp, and a door that squeals loud enough to wake three of them.

  Indoors

• The dispensary

  Two metres square, shelves to the ceiling, the drug cupboard on the back wall and no window.

  Indoors

• The records room

  Every file the hospital has ever kept, and the only room in the east wing that was unlocked all night.

  Indoors

• The ambulance yard

  Wet gravel, two vehicles and the back steps, out of sight of every window in the wing.

  Outdoors

Evidence & statements

1. The lightest of the four things was with whoever was in the night ward.
2. Exactly one of these is true, never both: the sandbag was in the records room, or Charles Neave was in the dispensary.
3. Exactly one of these is true, never both: whoever was in the dispensary is the shortest of the four, or the loaded syringe was out in the ambulance yard.
4. Whoever was carrying the leather doctor's bag is the tallest of the four.
5. Paul Brennan was not in the night ward.
6. Sayer was struck by something steel with a bent guard, and paint from it is on his coat: the killer is whoever was carrying the oxygen cylinder.

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