Step Into the Story

Anton Draganov died quietly, of a heart attack, in his own home. Within a week, his private study had been searched and the one thing he never let anyone touch — a lifetime's worth of secrets, kept in a cipher only he was supposed to understand — was gone.

For decades, Anton was one of the region's most careful black-market antiquities dealers: never flashy, never caught, and — it turns out — never entirely honest even with the people who trusted him most. His personal ledger wasn't just old business. It was proof of exactly what he took, and from whom, across a lifetime nobody else ever fully saw.

Not police work — a recovery, and a race

You're investigating for The Provenance Trust, a private cultural-heritage recovery organisation that had been quietly building a case against Anton for years, waiting for the right moment to either prosecute him or negotiate the return of what he'd taken. His death didn't close that file. It may have just made things harder — because whoever has that ledger now has decades of his secrets, and at least one shipment of genuinely stolen antiquities he never actually delivered.

Nobody's died as a result of the theft. Nobody's called the police, and nobody's going to. What's actually at stake is whether a hidden cache of looted cultural property gets returned to where it belongs — or vanishes into the market for good, in the hands of whoever gets there first. That might not be you.

A house full of mourners, and only one who went into the study

The memorial gathering after Anton's funeral brought together everyone who ever had a reason to care what happened to that ledger: a relative back in the country for the first time in years, a business partner of two decades who gave a short, genuine remembrance to the room, and the caretaker who'd managed Anton's house — and, it turns out, spent a great deal of time near that study — for his final eighteen months.

During that fifteen-minute remembrance, with the whole gathering's attention on one room, the rest of the house sat essentially unwatched. Someone used that window. Working out who requires more than a guess — you'll need an alibi, a motive, and an opportunity that actually survives being checked against the minute.

What you'll actually be doing

This is one of our more demanding cases: a genuine substitution cipher to work out for yourself, using a photograph, a shipping record, and one deliberately misleading example designed to teach you the mechanic without handing you the answer. Once you've got it, you'll be applying it to a real coded ledger entry — and reading three separate accounts, one of which was never meant to be found at all.

By the end, you'll need to say — clearly, and with evidence — who actually took the ledger during the gathering, what drove them to it, how they had the opportunity in that one specific window, and why the other two names on your list aren't, in fact, responsible.

If you want to judge this one against anything else on the market first, the nine checks in our buyer's guide are the same ones we hold our own cases to.

Step Into the Story

Every record the bank holds says the same thing: decommissioned, contents none, nothing to see. So why did someone go to the trouble of quietly resealing it during a power cut nobody was supposed to notice?

The old Church Street branch is being cleared ahead of a scheduled redevelopment — the kind of routine, unglamorous work that mostly involves clipboards and dust sheets. Then, in the early hours of 14 June, the night security officer notices something the paperwork can't explain: the vault's inner seal has been disturbed, and carefully put back, during a maintenance blackout that shouldn't have given anyone the chance.

According to every system the bank holds, that vault has been empty since 1994. Officially, there was never anything here worth stealing back. Unofficially, someone was willing to arrange a five-hour power outage to get near it — which means either the records are wrong, or somebody wanted them to look that way for a very long time.

Brought in before anyone official finds out

Lena Marais, the bank's Head of Compliance & Legal, isn't ready to hand this to the insurers or the board — not yet, not until she knows what she's actually dealing with. So she brings in outside help, quietly, and that's where you come in: a set of pre-demolition sign-out slips, a decades-old locksmith's invoice, and a court judgment from 1985 that nobody's thought about in years, all waiting for someone to notice they belong to the same story.

What you're chasing isn't a straightforward theft. It's a secret that somebody has been protecting since long before the vault was ever declared "empty" on paper — and the closer you get, the less that word looks like an accident.

Everyone in this file has a reason to want that vault to stay shut

The Head of Archives has been quietly pulling old personnel files that have nothing to do with her actual job. A young CEO — grandson of a name buried in that 1985 court case — has had his office calling Archives about this exact vault, more than once, including the day of the break-in. A woman with a family grudge that predates all of you has been researching the same history from the outside. And a Branch Operations Manager whose sign-off happens to cover the exact area that was broken into is carrying a kind of stress that colleagues have definitely noticed.

Every one of them has a real reason to be on your list. Only one of them arranged that blackout.

What you'll actually be doing

This is the case that taught us three logins is better than one — you'll be cross-referencing an old locksmith's invoice against a personnel file to reconstruct a password nobody wrote down anywhere, reading through a colleague's actual inbox once you've earned your way in, and reading a real bank statement, transaction by transaction, to find the exact moment somebody's finances stopped adding up. Nothing is handed to you as a conclusion. You have to go and find it, the way an actual investigator would.

By the end, you'll need to say — clearly, and with evidence — who actually emptied that vault, what they took, why they wanted it, and how they had the access to pull it off. Get any one of those wrong and the case doesn't hold.

New to this kind of evening? Start with how to run a murder mystery at home, or read the nine checks worth running on any case before you buy it.