While the Light Lasts - Agatha Christie [42]
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.
Afterword
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