Death Stalks the Colonel is the third Dreadful Crimes case: Louis Prescott, a former army colonel who runs a munitions factory in Southwark, has been shot through the heart at noon. Several shots were fired at that moment, and you have to work out which bullet killed him.
Part 3 of 10 in The Dreadful Crimes
Prescott once commanded the 11th Foot in the Gold Coast campaign, where a botched flanking attack killed many of his men; some called him a coward and he resigned. Abberline thinks children playing with a found revolver hit him by accident. The orphans' target and firing mark, a bullet hole in a beer barrel, a recently fired rifle in an attic and medicine for sleeping sickness all point in different directions.
Samuel, Frederick Abberline's theory of the children, Jonas Hassett, Earl, Curtis and Bennett. Hassett and Curtis both served under Prescott; Bennett drives a beer cart past the factory each day.
The killer was Samuel, Bennett's cart boy and a former army sharpshooter who blamed Prescott for his friends' deaths. He had taunted the colonel with a white feather and shot him from the back of the beer cart at noon. The attic rifle's bullet hit the clock and the children's revolver shot went into a barrel.
Hassett heard two shots right at the stroke of noon. Curtis admits he deals in stolen guns and says Prescott dared him that morning to hit the 12 on the clock from his shop, a shot he narrowly missed. Earl, one of the orphans, says a loud bang made him miss their target completely, and a half-plucked white goose lies near the barrel depot.
A Simple Matter of Murder!
A Simple Matter of Murder! is the first Dreadful Crimes case: a foreman lies stabbed in a Whitechapel warehouse and a boy is found holding the bloody knife. Henry Raymond and young Artie introduce themselves and challenge you to solve it, and the obvious answer turns out to be wrong.
Locked in... to Die!
Locked in... to Die! is the sixth Dreadful Crimes case: the music critic Byron Cashan is found dead in a room locked from the inside, in a lodging house in the Strand. You check each tenant's room and the basement to work out how the killer reached him.
Murder at the Palace!
Murder at the Palace! is the final Dreadful Crimes case: Frederick Abberline calls you to Buckingham Palace, where a guard lies dead in Queen Victoria's study on the day of a knighting ceremony. The case pulls in clues from every earlier crime and ends with a rooftop standoff.
The Case of the Conflicted Courtship
The Case of the Conflicted Courtship is the second Dreadful Crimes case: a young woman, Prudence Browne, has been stabbed to death in a park in the City of London. Her diary, a doctor's medicine packet and some handwriting clues lead you around the homes and office of the men in her life.