Step Into the StoryComing Soon

The story ran on the front page. The correction ran on page two, three months later. In between, a company died.

Kesterley District Council put its waste and recycling contract out to tender for the first time in fourteen years. The long-standing incumbent lost. The contract went to a smaller family firm, run by a woman named Frances Aubrey, on a bid nine per cent cheaper — the kind of result that should have been a good news story.

Six weeks before the new contract was due to start, The Kesterley Clarion ran a front-page exposé: leaked council correspondence and a payment record that, the paper said, proved Frances Aubrey had bought the contract. The council opened an investigation. The new firm's lender pulled its funding within nine days. A firm mid-way through fitting out vehicles and a depot, suddenly with no financing and no ability to earn, doesn't survive that. Ninety-one jobs went. The council quietly reverted to the old contractor — which is the detail almost nobody notices, and the one that matters most.

Three months later, the Clarion printed a correction: the leaked material couldn't be authenticated, and the paper accepted the allegations were unfounded. Frances Aubrey sued for defamation. And that's where you come in.

You're working for the paper that might have ruined her

You're forensic investigators, instructed by the solicitors defending the Clarion, which is fighting this on a public-interest defence. Your job is to reconstruct exactly what happened to those leaked documents — because the defence, and the newspaper's own insurance cover, both turn on one question: was the newsroom fooled, or was it complicit?

That's not a comfortable position to investigate from. You're working for a client whose survival depends on what you find, and there's a real chance what you find sinks them anyway. Nothing here is a crime scene. It's disclosure — committee minutes, tender sheets, weighbridge tickets, newsroom copy, an insurer's own claim file — produced by people who all had reasons to shape what they handed over.

The forged documents are sitting right in front of you

Here's the part that makes this case genuinely different: you don't read a description of the forgery. You get the actual leaked package, exactly as the newsroom received it — and half of it is completely real. A genuine payment, to a genuine firm, for genuine work, made years before any of this started. The other half was built to sit next to it and borrow its credibility. Working out which is which, and who could possibly have built it, is the entire investigation.

Along the way you'll meet a reporter who's been suspended over a story that wasn't entirely hers to get wrong, an editor who cut a verification step that exists for exactly this situation, a councillor with a real and properly declared financial connection to one of the leaked documents, and a council compliance officer twenty-two years into a job nobody ever looks at twice. Every one of them can explain a piece of what happened. Only one of them built the forgery.

What you'll actually be doing

This one doesn't ask you to read someone's private inbox — it asks you to search institutional records the way a real forensic accountant would. You'll be comparing a document-reference format against a system migration date to catch an anachronism nobody meant to leave behind, cross-checking a company register against a client's own ledger, and doing arithmetic on a weighbridge ticket book that looks perfectly ordinary until you sort it by load type.

By the end, you'll need to say — clearly, and with the paperwork to back it up — who built the leak, how it survived a legal read on deadline, and why. Get the who right and the why wrong, and the case still doesn't hold.

Step Into the StoryComing Soon

Your mother said she didn't do it. She was right, and she knew who did.

Seventeen years ago, the sculptor Anton Vael died at Marrow Point — the family's studio and smallholding on South Africa's West Coast — poisoned during a weekend gathering with the people closest to him. His wife, Rosalind, was convicted eleven months later, on evidence that was largely circumstantial but for one damning detail: she was seen washing out the decanter believed to have carried the poison. She died in custody, fourteen months into her sentence.

You were ten years old. You're turning twenty-eight now — the exact age your mother was written into her own trust, the age she was when she married your father. That birthday unseals a personal archive she left behind, and the family solicitor hands it to you along with the rest of the estate. Inside is a letter, written in the months before she died, stating plainly that she didn't do it. And that she knew who did.

This time, nobody hired you

Every previous Exhibit A case has put you on the outside of the story — a consultant, an investigator, someone brought in to look at other people's lives. Not this one. This is your father, your mother, and your own name on the birth certificate.

The family's solicitor is honest with you about what you're actually holding: a route, not a guarantee. A petition under section 327 of the Criminal Procedure Act, addressed to the Minister of Justice, presenting new evidence that materially affects a conviction — a mechanism written for a living petitioner, with essentially no precedent for a case like yours. Your job is to assemble the evidence that petition needs. The report you eventually file isn't a police report or an insurer's finding. It's the substance of your own affidavit.

Five people were at Marrow Point that weekend. All five are still alive.

There's your father's business partner, who'd discovered a discrepancy in a foundry ledger days before your father died and had a great deal to lose if it ever surfaced. There's your mother's half-sister, mid-argument with your father that same weekend over a family cottage neither of them would back down on. There's the estate's longtime manager, who handled the household accounts and never quite explained a discrepancy of her own. And there's a woman who modelled for your father for three years — present at Marrow Point, and, as far as the original investigation ever established, entirely unremarkable.

Nobody in this file is a stranger. That's what makes reading their statements seventeen years later so much harder than it should be.

What you'll actually be doing

You're working through your mother's own unsealed email account, your father's studio business archive, and the original defence file itself — three separate archives, each released to you specifically because of who you are, not because of a badge or a warrant. Somewhere in a foundry pour log, an edition number that was supposed to mean something stops adding up. Somewhere in a caterer's schedule and a family photographer's contact sheet, a twenty-minute window narrows to exactly one person. And somewhere in your mother's own words, never sent to anyone, is the thing the original trial never had a way to hear.

By the end, you'll need to say — clearly, and with enough to actually put in front of the family's solicitor — who poisoned your father, what happened, and why. Your mother already told you she knew the answer. She just didn't get to say it in a way anyone believed.

Step Into the StoryComing Soon

Six people. One road. It went at midnight.

Ardenfell Observatory sits on an upland plateau, ninety kilometres from the nearest town, reached by a single road that crosses a shallow river at a low-water ford. Six people were there for a three-night observing run. On the second night, the rain didn't stop, the ford went under, and the only way in or out of Ardenfell disappeared with it.

Somewhere around 02:00, Dr. Miriam Hallam — a revered astronomer on what everyone knew was her last observing run before her health ended her career — fell roughly seven metres from the exterior catwalk of the main dome onto the concrete below. It should have been a tragic accident on a dark, badly-lit walkway. Then the site manager's own report mentioned a catwalk gate that shouldn't have been open, and a witness account that didn't quite hold together.

It was forty hours before the road was passable again and anyone official could reach the site. Forty hours, six people, one building, and — for at least one of them — the growing certainty that somebody in that room had probably killed her.

Forty hours is a long time to get your story straight

You're detectives with the Hartsmere Constabulary Major Crime Unit, brought in the moment a probable accident became a suspected homicide. But this isn't a scene anyone preserved for you. The first accounts were taken over a satellite phone by a non-police first responder, and by the time you actually arrive, six people have had forty hours together to talk, to tidy, and — whether they meant to or not — to align.

What you get instead is something better than an untouched crime scene: a set of very human, very self-interested statements, and the one category of witness at Ardenfell that had no motive and no forty hours to reconsider anything — the observatory's own machines. Dome rotation logs. Instrument exposure logs. A power event log. A long-exposure camera pointed at the sky the whole time. None of them can lie, and none of them are on anyone's side.

Everyone at Ardenfell had a reason to be up there

There's a visiting instrumentation scientist commissioning new equipment, with a professional history nobody on site actually knows. There's a postdoctoral researcher whose entire career is riding on this run's data, and who's worked out something about Miriam he's not saying out loud. There's the site manager — twenty years at Ardenfell, the only person who holds a key to that catwalk, and the only one who knew exactly which section of handrail was unsafe. And there's a technician who lied about being asleep, and a science journalist Miriam had threatened to freeze out of a story that mattered to her.

Opportunity doesn't help you here — everyone on site had it. This one gets solved on means, motive, and the moment a person's own account stops matching what a machine wrote down.

What you'll actually be doing

You'll build a reconstruction grid — six names down the side, the hour that matters across the top — and fill it in twice: once from what each person says, and once from what the site's own systems recorded. Somewhere in that grid is exactly one cell where those two versions cannot both be true. You'll need warrant access into the site's own mail system, a production order for an off-site university record no one at Ardenfell could have touched, and a password assembled from two documents that, on their own, have nothing to do with this observatory at all.

By the end, you'll need to state — clearly, and against a docket that either holds or doesn't — who is responsible, what actually happened on that catwalk, and why. Rule out the obvious answer first. It's there for a reason.