I adapted my story; had the picture as the entrance to the mansion and subsequent Billiard Room, included a depiction of it, with the bikerider going past as the host greets his first guest.
My story was essentially a clue-puzzle; with the host (Professor Herald Bloom) who has two detectives (the Sergeant) and (the Earl) over for the night. The Seargeant is characterised as the archetypal hardboiled private-eye,
"Sergeant Benjamin L Thompson... a former serviceman and ex-Sergeant of the Los Angeles Police Department. The Sergeant could stand neither the discipline of the army, nor the incompetency of the police force, and so had forged his career as a private-eye. He entered wearing a black hat and grey trench coat, the lowered visor and upturned collar shielding his eyes from all view so that only a permeation of smoke emanated from beneath the unfriendly guise. Bloom considered this man no more than a minor vigil anti; one who pleased neither the suspects he investigated nor those who employed him to do so. He worked by the rule of that pathetic, limiting, and dis-ambitious voice of ‘conscience’: a sound that to Bloom was but a whisper now."
The Earl is effectively a Sherlock Holmes invention, mixed in with Hercule Poirot,
"the disinherited Earl of Middshire, Bloom’s second guest, dressed in a crimson vest, soiled by the rain outside. A pack of curled shoulder-length hair sat damp like a mop on his pale face. He was stylish and smart, by some labelled a genius, for to this youth’s sharp mind not a puzzle could remain undone, not a mystery left unsolved or a leaf unturned. But Bloom knew of this prodigy’s dark side: he had a taste for opium, and the headaches it brought on drew him into the depths of insomnia. He was as insane as he was brilliant, a narrow tangent between the boundaries of both, and in that existence he was totally mad."
Meanwhile the Professor is effectively the blue-blooded host whose tainted reputation has resulted in the detectives coming to investigation him, secretly. But of course he is aware, and the whole night is a complete construction of his. He reconstructs the world in which they enter. He plans a crime (the theft of a gijsaw puzzle) from his own puzzle.
The two detectives try and solve the crime through their individual methods; the Sergeant using unrelenting persistence whilst the Earl, superior intellect.
But in the end they cannot find either the location of the stolen item or its current possessor and so give up. It is then revealed that 'the Butler did it' - literally; as Bloom's manipulation of the event is revealed, he essentially brings 'destruction' upon their world by revealing the falseness of their profession, goal and methods. Once revealed they shout out,
"What? When? Where? Who? And How?"
Whilst Bloom retorts by saying,
"Truth, like art is in the eye of the beholder. You believe what you choose, and I'll believe what I know. Goodnight gentlemen, I shall see you in the morrow."
In the aftermath of the reconstruction of reality followed by this subsequent destruction, the detectives creep over to the now completed puzzle, after the Butler returns to final elusive piece [the reconstruction once again]. In the final denouement, the Earl and the Sergeant see that the final piece bears a word on it; and they wish that they had never left that cobbled street road, up that winding staircase and into the house of a madman.
The puzzle reads:
"Whydunit?"
[By the way, sorry to all those people who didn't want to read all this; I have a terrible habbit of going on and on. I tried to cut it down as much as possible through this summary. It was 19 pages long in the exam.]