The Reef Station

Espiritu Santo · coral-spawning night · the director missed the midnight call · Difficulty: Detective 5 · 9×9

Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu, the night of the coral spawning. The reef station's team came back from the night dive, logged the spawn and spread out across the station to rinse gear, cook and sort samples. When the director, Votausi, missed the midnight radio call, they went looking for her and found her dead. The reef spawned on without her.

Rules

1. Every row and every column holds exactly one person. As soon as you place someone, cross out their whole row and column.
2. “Beside” = directly left, right, above or below, and in the same area. Squares with objects (the microscopes, the touch pool, the lockers, the oxygen tanks, the desk, the sink, the table, the palms, the rock, the coil of rope, the bollard, the campfire and the water) cannot be occupied; the beds, the chairs, the benches, the swing and the boat can.
3. Directions refer to rows and columns, not to the same line: “exactly one row north of her was a woman” = the person in the row directly above is a woman, in any column.
4. The murderer was alone with the victim: nobody else was in that area.

Statements

• Alick (coral ecologist): He was beside the campfire.
• Baldwin (fisheries biologist): The desk was somewhere in his row.
• Cecile (lab technician): She was in the last row.
• Dorah (oceanographer): There was a diver in her area. There was no other woman in her area.
• Esline (dive master): A locker was somewhere in her row. She was not with Gaetan.
• Frazer (boat skipper and diver): The swing was somewhere in his column.
• Gaetan (student from Luganville): He was the only man sitting in a chair.
• Hellen (reef-monitoring volunteer): A bed was somewhere in her area. Exactly one row north of her was a researcher.
• Votausi (director, marine biologist): The victim. She was found in the Lab, beside the touch pool – alone with the murderer.

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