Agatha Christie - While the light lasts

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 - "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 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.