It’s hard to imagine anything sinister taking place behind the glittering outer shell of Yas Island, but on a humid mid-June night, all is not as it seems.
Eight Time Outers have assembled in a private room to investigate the murder of one Jo Shooie, a female Formula 17 racing driver. Jo’s car appears to have been tampered with during a recent Grand Prix, and it is up to us to discover ‘whodunit’, and why. All of which shouldn’t be too difficult; we’re ‘reporters’ after all…
We each arrive separately as night falls on the glistening hotel. Making our way to our rooms, we find an envelope on our beds containing vital (and highly secret) information pertaining to the character we’ll be playing this evening.
We congregate around 8pm in a secluded room between Amici, the hotel’s Italian restaurant, and its Indian outlet, Angar. In keeping with the rest of the hotel, it’s a large white space that doesn’t exactly scream murder and mystery, but is trés chic nonetheless. Tonight’s menu will be Italian (though, we’re told we could feasibly have had a mix from both neighbours), and appropriate drinks are primed to flow throughout the darkening evening.
Being the tardy lot that we are, it takes an age for Dylan – our host for the evening – to get everyone to the table. Even then, the poor man has to contend with the fact that half our number has failed to read their instructions. Kudos to Dylan, however, who seems to be a man well equipped to dealing with others’ shortcomings, and he quickly has us slapped into some kind of shape, ready to feast on murder (and some excellent pizza).
At the table sits a motley crew from the imaginary world of Formula 17. There’s Mike Hacker, a racing wunderkind with a few secrets up his sleeve; there’s Jean Picard, a character we all took to be an exotic French man, who later reveals herself to be a rather dull British granny, and there’s Michaela Sprint, a kind of female Bernie Ecclestone (with nicer hair). Elsewhere on the table there’s – both with similarly confusing unisex names – Sam Chelsea, a bitter old squabbler and Pat McDonald, a self-important team owner, with his hapless and lovelorn driver, Jac Noir, mournfully in tow. There’s also Wendy Shooie, sister of the deceased, and – by all accounts – a bit of a goer, and Marc Pizzt, a flamboyant man bearing grudges, whose name gets more difficult to deal with the more you drink.
The game is riotous fun, though what you get out of it depends entirely on your disposition. For this writer, things became overly befuddled sometime around the serving of the main course, which allowed the opportunity to observe my colleagues at play. The Bernie Ecclestone figure, very much the game’s head honcho, was played by one of our designers – considerably less demonstrative in everyday life than she was required to be here. Jean Picard – an out and out dullard without a clue what was going on – was portrayed by our sub editor, usually the most on-the-ball member of our crew, and the magazine editor’s character was required to be an unstoppable love-rat; he’d end up with an unstoppable lawsuit if he tried that in the office.
The highlight of the evening, however, was the hotel itself. The nonstop smorgasbord that piled in from the kitchen was grand enough – we especially enjoyed the huge pizzas and hunks of hammour that littered our table, not to mention the rather wicked dessert (a rich, spirited cake, absolutely to die for, if you’ll pardon the pun) – but all of this plus a night in one of the city’s most iconic five-stars, all for well under Dhs1,000? We felt as though we may have been robbing the organisers blind. A night of crime never felt so good.
It’d be unfair to reveal anything more about the game itself, suffice to say that ‘race marshal’ Dylan probably left dreaming of ringing our sorry necks. A word of advice to potential sleuths – make sure you swat up thoroughly before you arrive at the table. You wouldn’t want anything nasty to happen, now, would you?
Yas Hotel’s Whodunit Package (02 656 0600). Dhs640 per person, per double occupancy; Dhs880 per person, per single occupancy. Price includes a three course meal with a half bottle of wine per person, plus overnight stay with buffet breakfast.
