The Gossiping House

A Budapest tenement · washing day, 1936 · every word is about the room next door · Difficulty: Inspector 8 · 12×12

Saturday morning in 1936, washing day in a tenement in Budapest’s eighth district. The ground floor wraps around a cobbled courtyard: the caretaker’s lodge, the woodshed, the grocer’s, the gateway, a little coffee bar, the laundry, the tailor’s, the stairwell and the piano teacher’s music room. At half past nine Vid, the caretaker who knew every key and every secret of the house, was found dead in the steaming laundry, beside the mangle. In this house nobody says a word about the room they are in – but everybody watches the other rooms through the open doors. So every tenant and visitor told the detective only what they had seen through a door. One of them had been alone with Vid in the laundry.

Rules

Everyone testified only about rooms they could see into through a door but were not in themselves.
Every row and every column holds exactly one person. As soon as you place someone, cross out their whole row and column.
“Beside” = directly left, right, above or below, and in the same area. Squares with objects (the piano, the music stand, the plants, the stairs, the sewing machine, the dressmaker’s dummies, the tables, the washtubs, the mangle, the sink, the wardrobe, the stove, the firewood, the well, the tree, the carpet-beating rail, the handcart, the flower bed, the counters, the shelf, the barrel, the bicycle, the sign, the espresso machine and the bistro tables) cannot be occupied; the armchair, the chairs, the stools, the bed and the benches can. A corner of an area is a square of that area that borders the outside (another area or the edge of the board) on one horizontal and one vertical side.
The brown bars on the walls are doors: each one joins the two rooms on its two sides.
The murderer was alone with the victim: nobody else was in that area.

Statements

Adél (the piano teacher): Nobody in the Gateway was beside the bicycle.
Bódog (the retired tram conductor): Somebody was in a corner of the Courtyard. Exactly one person in the Courtyard was beside the flower bed.
Cili (the seamstress’s daughter): There was a woman beside a bistro table in the Coffee Bar.
Domokos (the night-shift printer): There were exactly two people in the Grocer’s. No tenant in the Courtyard was beside the handcart.
Emma (the young widow from the second floor): There was a tenant in the Stairwell.
Ferdinánd (the law student): There was a visitor sitting on a chair in the Coffee Bar.
Gedeon (the coal merchant): Somebody in the Stairwell was beside a plant.
Hanna (a regular at the coffee bar): There was a man beside the carpet-beating rail in the Courtyard.
Ilka (the washerwoman): Emma was in the Tailor’s.
Jusztina (the postwoman): There was a man beside the shelf in the Grocer’s.
Kelemen (the knife-grinder): There was a visitor in the Gateway. Somebody was in a corner of the Gateway.
Vid (the caretaker): The victim. He was found in the Laundry, beside the mangle – alone with the murderer.

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