The Pembroke File

A noir mystery you solve by actually reading the case. The Pembroke Diamond — thirty-four carats — left the Ashford Museum in three minutes of dark, and the insurance investigator who worked the claim vanished, leaving his file locked in a cabinet: five drawers behind a brass dial, a letter lock, an alarm panel, a wire board, and a lever. Every answer is written somewhere in the documents you have already opened, and each drawer turns the case — an inside job, a rehearsed route, a canvass that came back empty, an appraisal that proves the stone was glass. Physical puzzles gate the locks: the museum’s shuffled night-reel plates, the investigator’s reconstruction torn to twelve pieces, a jammed card tray, a sabotaged lamp circuit — and a pencil rubbing that raises the one name he never dared file out of a blank desk pad. Verlet chain physics, synthesized Web Audio, keyboard paths for every puzzle, progress that survives reloads — all in a single HTML file with zero dependencies.