The Lunch Thief
Monday 9 March 2026
DC Marianne Sowande, Islington CID
Kestrel & Vane, 4th Floor, Sable House, 41 Britton Street, Clerkenwell EC1
Ellis Moore, 38, hospitalised 6 March after eating a deliberately contaminated lunch from a fourth-floor kitchen fridge that had already lost six weeks of other people's food
On Friday 6 March 2026, Ellis Moore, a motion designer at the digital agency Kestrel & Vane, was admitted to the Whittington Hospital's A&E department after eating a lunch he found in a meeting-room fridge. He assumed it was spare client catering. Toxicology found the food had been laced with chilli extract and a stimulant laxative - deliberate contamination, not an accident, not food poisoning. The hospital's own report is what brought this to CID, not the office: for six weeks before it, what had looked like petty workplace theft - yoghurts and biscuits, then whole labelled lunches, taken one after another from the same kitchen fridge - had gone unreported to police at all. The office has no camera in the kitchen. It does have badge readers on every floor door, a coffee machine that logs a PIN against every cup, meeting software that records who was on camera and when, and a covert camera someone installed without telling anyone.
Establish who contaminated the lunch eaten by Ellis Moore, and separately, who has been taking food from the fourth-floor kitchen fridge for six weeks. The two questions do not necessarily have the same answer. Use the building's access logs, digital records, and witness accounts to fix the true sequence of events on 6 March, eliminate everyone who cannot have taken the labelled box, and name the person responsible with evidence that would stand up in court. Each stage is sealed: prove your reasoning before the next set of records is released.
Who's involved
7 people are connected to this case. In the game you'll interview each of them and weigh their motive against whether they really had the opportunity.
Dermot Nash
Facilities & Office Manager
Ellis Moore
Motion Designer
Ishani Raval
Senior Designer
Kit Larkin
Junior Account Executive
Marta Kowal
Contract cleaner (Brightsweep FM)
Saoirse Devlin
Operations Lead
Wesley Adeyemi
Finance Director
Playing a case
- 01Read the briefing and open the evidence board.
- 02Examine forensics, documents, messages and CCTV, and interview every suspect.
- 03Clear each checkpoint deduction to unlock the next stage as the clock runs down.
- 04Name the culprit, their motive and their method, then get scored against the full solution.
Ready to open the file on The Lunch Thief?
Play this case