"Kirkhill Station," read out Fenella.
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 marvelous: What a sell! Really. Uncle Myles was a most ingenious old gentleman!"
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:
Dear Sir or Madam,
Escuse delay but have been all sixes and sevens but i do now as mr. Mylecharane axed me to and send you the piece of riting wot as been in my family many long years the wot he wanted it for i do not know.
thanking you i am
Mary Kerruish
"Postmark - Bride," I remarked. "Now for the 'piece of riting handed down in my family'!"
Upon a rock, a sign you'll see.
O, tell me what the point of
That may be? Well, firstly, (A). Near
By you'll find, quite suddenly, the light
You seek. Then (B). A house. A
Cottage with a thatch and wall.
A meandering lane near by. That all.
"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 unraveling 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 marvelous 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."
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 snapshot 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."
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.
* * *
The treasure is all that is left of the lost fortune of "Old Mylecharane," a legendary Manx smuggler. In reality, the treasure took the form of four snuffboxes, each about the size of a matchbox and containing an eighteenth-century Manx halfpenny with a hole in it, through which was tied a length of colored ribbon, and a neatly folded document, executed with many flourishes in India 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 one hundred pounds (equivalent to about three thousand pounds 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 excluded from the hunt.
The sole purpose of the first clue in "Manx Gold," the rhyme which begins "Four points of the compass so there be," published in the Daily Dispatch on Saturday, May 31, 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 June 7. However, the treasure had already been found by a tailor from Inverness, William Shaw, because sufficient clues to its location were contained in the story itself.
The most important clue was Fenella's remark that the hiding place was near the place "where 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 southeast of the Isle of Man. The "quite near" island to which "a secret passage" was rumored 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 on the map by a circle with six lines projected from it to represent the six historical cannons - "si
x 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 northeasterly direction from between the middle two cannons - "between these two have you got the compass?" - while Juan's initial suggestion that the clue "points to the northeast of the island" was a red herring.
The second snuffbox, apparently constructed from horn, was located on June 9 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 hunts-man, 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 snapshot," which was published as the third clue on June 9, would not have been "very hard to identify"; it was 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 another red herring.
The third "treasure" was found by Mr. Herbert Elliot, a Manx-born ship's engineer living in Liverpool M. Elliot 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 July 8, he chanced upon the snuffbox, hidden in a gully.
The principal clue to its whereabouts was hidden in the fourth clue, published on June 14 (the vers beginning "In '85, this place made history"), in which the second word of each line spells out the following message:
"85... paces... east... north... east... of... sacred... circle... Spanish... head." The "Sacred circle" is the Meayll circle on Mull Hill, a roegalithic monument a little over a mile from the Spanish Head, the most southerly point of the island. The reference 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 southward, it eventually crosses the Meayll circle, "the exact spot" identified by Juan.
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 June 21, but on July 10, 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:
That last clue still makes me smile when I remember the time we wasted looking for rocks with a sign on them. The real clue was so simple - the words "sixes and sevens" in the covering letter.
Take the sixth and seventh words of each line of the verse, and you get this: "You'll see. Point of (A). Near the lighthouse a wall." See the point of (A) we identified as the Point of Ayre. We spent some time finding the right wall, and the treasure itself was not there. Instead, there were four figures - 2, 5, 6, and 9 scrawled on a stone.
Apply them to the letters of the first line of the verse, and you get the word "park." There is only one real park in the Isle of Man, at Ramsey. We searched that park, and found at last what we sought.
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 northern-most tip of the island.
It is impossible to judge whether or not "Manx Gold" was a successful means of promoting tourism on 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 up criticism."
The fact that they were not allowed to take part in the hunt might 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 one hundred fifty pounds today. This also might 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 fruit peel.
While there never has been any other event quite like 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 Three Blind Mice (1948). There is also a similarly structured "murder hunt" in the Poirot novel Dead Man's Folly (1956).
WITHIN A WALL
It was Mrs. Lemprière who discovered the existence of Jane Haworth. It would be, of course. Somebody once said that Mrs. Lemprière was easily the most hated woman in London, but that, I think, is an exaggeration. She has certainly a knack of tumbling on the one thing you wish to keep quiet about, and she does it with real genius. It is always an accident.
In this case we had been having tea in Alan Everard's studio. He gave these teas occasionally, and used to stand about in corners, wearing very old clothes, rattling the coppers in his trouser pockets and looking profoundly miserable.
I do not suppose anyone will dispute Everard's claim to genius at this date. His two most famous pictures, Color and The Connoisseur, which belong to his early period, before he became a fashionable portrait painter, were purchased by the nation last year, and for once the choice went unchallenged. But at the date of which I speak, Everard was only beginning to come into his own, and we were free to consider that we had discovered him.
It was his wife who organized these parties. Everard's attitude to her was a peculiar one. That he adored her was evident, and only to be expected. Adoration was Isobel's due. But he seemed always to feel himself slightly in her debt. He assented to anything she wished, not so much through tenderness as through an unalterable conviction that she had a right to her own way. I suppose that was natural enough, too, when one comes to think of it.
For Isobel Loring had been really very celebrated. When she came out she had been the débutante of the season. She had everything except money; beauty, position, breeding, brains. Nobody expected her to marry for love. She wasn't that kind of girl. In her second season she had three strings to her bow, the heir to a dukedom, a rising politician, and a South African millionaire. And then, to everyone's surprise, she married Alan Everard - a struggling young painter whom no one had ever heard of.
It is a tribute to her personality, I think, that everyone went on calling her Isobel Loring. Nobody ever alluded to her as Isobel Everard. It would be: "I saw Isobel Loring this morning. Yes - with her husband, young Everard, the painter fellow."
People said Isobel had "done for herself." It would, I think, have "done" for most men to be known as "Isobel Loring's husband." But Everard was different. Isobel's talent for success hadn't failed her af
ter all. Alan Everard painted Color.
I suppose everyone knows the picture: a stretch of road with a trench dug down it, and turned earth, reddish in color, a shining length of brown glazed drain-pipe and the huge navvy, resting for a minute on his spade - a Herculean figure in stained corduroys with a scarlet neckerchief. His eyes look out at you from the canvas, without intelligence, without hope, but with a dumb unconscious pleading, the eyes of a magnificent brute beast. It is a flaming thing - a symphony of orange and red. A lot has been written about its symbolism, about what it is meant to express. Alan Everard himself says he didn't mean it to express anything. He was, he said, nauseated by having had to look at a lot of pictures of Venetian sunsets, and a sudden longing for a riot of purely English color assailed him.
After that, Everard gave the world that epic painting of a public house - Romance: the black street with rain falling - the half-open door, the lights and shining glasses, the little foxy-faced man passing through the doorway, small, mean, insignificant, with lips parted and eyes eager, passing in to forget.
On the strength of these two pictures Everard was acclaimed as a painter of "working men." He had his niche. But he refused to stay in it. His third and most brilliant work, a full-length portrait of Sir Rufus Herschman. The famous scientist is painted against a background of retorts and crucibles and laboratory shelves. The whole has what may be called a Cubist effect, but the lines of perspective run strangely.
And now he had completed his fourth work - a portrait of his wife. We had been invited to see and criticize. Everard himself scowled and looked out of the window; Isobel Loring moved amongst the guests, talking technique with unerring accuracy.
We made comments. We had to. We praised the painting of the pink satin. The treatment of that, we said, was really marvelous. Nobody had painted satin in quite that way before.
Mrs. Lemprière, who is one of the most intelligent art critics I know, took me aside almost at once.
The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories Page 9
