The Sealed Doorway

Valley of the Kings · 28 November 1922 · the night before the official opening · Difficulty: Officer 4 · 8×8

Valley of the Kings, night of 28 November 1922. Tomorrow the sealed doorway between the two statues will be opened – but tonight the excavation leader, his team, the cook and the patron's daughter crept down the stairs with electric lamps and climbed into the tomb. Vasilios, a Greek antiquities dealer who should not have been there, was found dead. Someone let him in, and someone silenced him.

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 lamps, the chests, the great shrine, the jackal, the statues, the funerary couches, the chariot, the steps and the amphora) cannot be occupied.
3. Directions refer to rows and columns, not to the same line: “exactly one row north of him 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

• Alec (Egyptologist, leader of the excavation): He was beside the great shrine.
• Betty (chemist and conservator): She was the only woman beside a funerary couch.
• Charles (expedition photographer): A statue was somewhere in his row.
• Daoud (reis, foreman of the workmen): Exactly one row north of him was a man.
• Enid (artist copying the wall paintings): She was in a corner of her area. The great shrine was somewhere in her row.
• Fatima (cook of the dig house): She was not beside a lamp. A lamp was somewhere in her area.
• Gillian (the patron's daughter): The chariot was somewhere in her column. Somebody else in her area was beside the great shrine.
• Vasilios (Greek antiquities dealer from Luxor): The victim. He was found in the Annex, beside a chest – alone with the murderer.

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