While the Light Lasts (12 page)

Just at that moment Fayll came round the corner. Whether he had heard or not we had no means of judging. He showed nothing.

‘But, Juan,' said Fenella, when he moved away,
‘there isn't a Kirkhill Station!' She held out the map as she spoke.

‘No,' I said, examining it, ‘but look here.'

And with a pencil I drew a line on it.

‘Of course! And somewhere on that line–'

‘Exactly.'

‘But I wish we knew the exact spot.'

It was then that my second brain-wave came to me.

‘We do!' I cried, and, seizing the pencil again, I said: ‘Look!'

Fenella uttered a cry.

‘How idiotic!' she cried. ‘And how marvellous! What a sell! Really, Uncle Myles was a most ingenious old gentleman!'

VII

The time had come for the last clue. This, the lawyer had informed us, was not in his keeping. It was to be posted to us on receipt of a postcard sent by him. He would impart no further information.

Nothing arrived, however, on the morning it should have done, and Fenella and I went through agonies, believing that Fayll had managed somehow to intercept our letter. The next day, however, our fears were
calmed and the mystery explained when we received the following illiterate scrawl:

‘Post mark–Bride,' I remarked. ‘Now for the “piece of riting handed down in my family”!'
^†

‘It's very unfair to begin with a rock,' said Fenella. ‘There are rocks everywhere. How can you tell which one has the sign on it?'

‘If we could settle on the district,' I said, ‘it ought to be fairly easy to find the rock. It must have a mark on it pointing in a certain direction, and in that direction
there will be something hidden which will throw light on the finding of the treasure.'

‘I think you're right,' said Fenella.

‘That's A. The new clue will give us a hint where B, the cottage, is to be found. The treasure itself is hidden down a lane alongside the cottage. But clearly we've got to find A first.'

Owing to the difficulty of the initial step, Uncle Myles's last problem proved a real teaser. To Fenella falls the distinction of unravelling it–and even then she did not accomplish it for nearly a week. Now and then we had come across Fayll in our search of rocky districts, but the area was a wide one.

When we finally made our discovery it was late in the evening. Too late, I said, to start off to the place indicated. Fenella disagreed.

‘Supposing Fayll finds it, too,' she said. ‘And we wait till tomorrow and he starts off tonight. How we should kick ourselves!'

Suddenly, a marvellous idea occurred to me.

‘Fenella,' I said, ‘do you still believe that Fayll murdered Ewan Corjeag?'

‘I do.'

‘Then I think that now we've got our chance to bring the crime home to him.'

‘That man makes me shiver. He's bad all through. Tell me.'

‘Advertise the fact that we've found A. Then start off. Ten to one he'll follow us. It's a lonely place–just what would suit his book. He'll come out in the open if we pretend to find the treasure.'

‘And then?'

‘And then,' I said, ‘he'll have a little surprise.'

VIII

It was close on midnight. We had left the car some distance away and were creeping along by the side of a wall. Fenella had a powerful flashlight which she was using. I myself carried a revolver. I was taking no chances.

Suddenly, with a low cry, Fenella stopped.

‘Look, Juan,' she cried. ‘We've got it. At last.'

For a moment I was off my guard. Led by instinct I whirled round–but too late. Fayll stood six paces away and his revolver covered us both.

‘Good evening,' he said. ‘This trick is mine. You'll hand over that treasure, if you please.'

‘Would you like me also to hand over something else?' I asked. ‘Half a snap-shot torn from a dying man's hand?
You have the other half, I think
.'

His hand wavered.

‘What are you talking about?' he growled.

‘The truth's known,' I said. ‘You and Corjeag were there together. You pulled away the ladder and crashed his head with that stone. The police are cleverer than you imagine, Dr Fayll.'

‘They know, do they? Then, by Heaven, I'll swing for three murders instead of one!'

‘Drop, Fenella,' I screamed. And at the same minute his revolver barked loudly.

We had both dropped in the heather, and before he could fire again uniformed men sprang out from behind the wall where they had been hiding. A moment later Fayll had been handcuffed and led away.

I caught Fenella in my arms.

‘I knew I was right,' she said tremulously.

‘Darling!' I cried, ‘it was too risky. He might have shot you.'

‘But he didn't,' said Fenella. ‘And we know where the treasure is.'

‘Do we?'

‘I do. See–' she scribbled a word. ‘We'll look for it tomorrow. There can't be many hiding places there, I should say.'

IX

It was just noon when:

‘Eureka!' said Fenella, softly. ‘The fourth snuffbox. We've got them all. Uncle Myles would be pleased. And now–'

‘Now,' I said, ‘we can be married and live together happily ever afterwards.'

‘We'll live in the Isle of Man,' said Fenella.

‘On Manx Gold,' I said, and laughed aloud for sheer happiness.

Juan and Fenella are first cousins and very much in the mould of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, the eponymous detectives in
Partners in Crime
(1929) and several later novels. They are also closely related to the young ‘sleuths' of any of Christie's early thrillers such as
The Secret of Chimneys
(1925) and
Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
(1934). In reality, as in the story, the ‘treasure' took the form of four snuffboxes, each about the size of a matchbox. The snuffboxes each contained an eighteenth-century Manx halfpenny, which had a hole in it, through which was tied a length of coloured ribbon. Each snuffbox also contained a neatly folded document, executed with many flourishes in Indian ink and signed by Alderman Crookall, which directed the finder to report at once to the Clerk at the Town Hall in Douglas, the capital of the Isle of Man. Finders were instructed to take with them the snuffbox and its
contents in order to claim a prize of £100 (equivalent to around £3,000 today). They also had to bring with them proof of identity for only visitors to the island were allowed to search for the treasure; Manx residents were debarred.

‘
A little intelligence could easily find the treasure
'

The sole purpose of the first clue in ‘Manx Gold', the rhyme which began ‘Four points of the compass so there be' and published in the
Daily Dispatch
on Saturday 31 May, was to indicate that the four treasures would be found in the north, south and west of the island but not in the east. The clue to the location of the first snuffbox was in fact the second clue, a map published on 7 June. However, the treasure had already been found by this time because sufficient clues to its location were contained in the story. The finder was a tailor from Inverness, William Shaw, who was reported in local newspapers to have celebrated the find by running in a circle, waving the snuffbox in the air, ‘while his good lady was too excited to speak for several minutes'!

The most important clue was Fenella's remark that the hiding place was near the place ‘where the Derby was originally run…before it was changed to Epsom'. This is a reference to the famous English horse-race,
which was first run at Derbyhaven in the south-east of the Isle of Man. The ‘quite near' island to which ‘a secret passage' was rumoured to run from a farmhouse can easily be identified as St Michael's Isle on which, in addition to the twelfth-century chapel of St Michael, is a circular stone tower known as the Derby Fort, from which the island gets its alternative name, Fort Island–‘the two together is a likely conjunction which doesn't seem to occur anywhere else'. The fort was represented in the map by a circle with six lines projecting from it to represent the six historic cannons–‘six of them'–in the fort; the chapel was represented by a cross.

The small pewter snuffbox was hidden on a rocky ledge running in a north-easterly direction from between the middle two cannon–‘between these two–have you got the compass?'–while Juan's initial suggestion that the clue ‘points to the north-east of the island' was a red herring.

‘
Too easy
'

The second snuffbox, apparently constructed from horn, was located on 9 June by Richard Highton, a Lancashire builder. As Fenella made clear to the murderous Dr Fayll, Ewan Corjeag's dying words ‘D'ye ken–' are a clue to the whereabouts of the treasure. In fact, they are the opening words of
the traditional English song
John Peel
about a Cumbrian huntsman and, when Juan suggested that ‘Bellman and True' was ‘the name of a firm that might help us', he was not referring to the ‘firm of lawyers in Douglas' mentioned at the beginning of the story but to two of John Peel's hounds, as named in the song. With these clues, the subject of the ‘torn snap-shot', which was published as the third clue on 9 June, would not have been ‘very hard to identify' they were the ruins of the fourteenth-century Peel Castle on St Patrick's Isle, and curved lines along the photograph's left-hand edge were the curlicues on the arm of a bench on Peel Hill, which looks down on the castle and under which the snuffbox was hidden. The charabanc journey to Snaefell, the highest peak on the Isle of Man, was a red herring.

‘
More or less by accident
'

The third ‘treasure' was found by Mr Herbert Elliott, a Manx-born ship's engineer living in Liverpool. Mr Elliott later claimed that he had not read ‘Manx Gold' nor even studied the clues, but had simply decided on a likely area where, very early on the morning of 8 July, he chanced upon the snuffbox, hidden in a gully.

The principal clue to its whereabouts was hidden in the fourth clue, published on 14 June (the verse
beginning ‘In '85, this place made history'), in which the second word of each line spells out the message:

‘
85 paces east north east of sacred circle Spanish Head.
'

The ‘sacred circle' is the Meayll circle on Mull Hill, a megalithic monument a little over a mile from Spanish Head, the most southerly point of the island. The references to an important event ‘in '85' and a Spanish chestnut, which from contemporary accounts proved a diversion for many searchers, were false leads. As for ‘Kirkhill Station', the clue uncovered by Juan, Fenella rightly said that there was no such place. However, there is a village called Kirkhill, and there is also a railway station at Port Erin, where Juan and Fenella had had lunch before starting their search. If a line is drawn from Kirkhill to Port Erin and continued southwards, it eventually crosses the Meayll circle, ‘the exact spot' identified by Juan.

‘
A real teaser
'

Unfortunately, as was the case with the clues to the location of the third snuffbox, those for the fourth were never solved. The fifth and final clue, the verse beginning ‘Upon a rock, a sign you'll see' was published on 21 June, but on 10 July, at the end of the extended
period allowed for the hunt, which had originally been intended to finish at the end of June, the final treasure was ‘lifted' by the Mayor of Douglas. Two days later, as a ‘sequel' to the story, the
Daily Dispatch
published a photograph of the event and Christie's explanation of the final clue:

The thatched building in question was a small refreshment kiosk, and the path leading past it ran up to an ivy-covered wall which was the hiding-place of the elusive snuffbox. The fact that the letter had been posted in Bride was an additional clue as this village is near the
lighthouse at the Point of Ayre, the northernmost tip of the island.

 

It is impossible to judge whether or not ‘Manx Gold' was a successful means of promoting tourism to the Isle of Man. Certainly, it appears that there were more visitors in 1930 than in previous years, but how far that increase could be ascribed to the treasure hunt is far from clear. Contemporary press reports show that there were many who doubted that it had been of any real value and, at a civic lunch to mark the end of the hunt, Alderman Crookall responded to a vote of thanks by railing against those who had failed to talk up the hunt–they were ‘slackers and grousers who never did anything but offer criticism'.

The fact that islanders were not allowed to take part in the hunt may have been a cause of apathy among the islanders, even though the
Daily Dispatch
offered the Manx resident with whom each finder was staying a prize of five guineas, equivalent to about £150 today. This may also have accounted for various acts of gentle ‘sabotage' such as the laying of false snuffboxes and spoof clues, including a rock on which the word ‘Lift' was painted but under which was nothing more interesting than discarded peel.

While there has never been any other event similar to the Isle of Man treasure hunt, Agatha Christie
did
go on
to write mysteries with a similar theme. Most obvious of these is the challenge laid down to Charmian Stroud and Edward Rossiter by their eccentric Uncle Mathew in ‘Strange Jest', a Miss Marple story first published in 1941 as ‘A Case of Buried Treasure' and collected in
Miss Marple's Final Cases
(1979). There is also a similarly structured ‘murder hunt' in the Poirot novel,
Dead Man's Folly
(1956).