Short Stories

by Agatha Christie

  "You think he's the murderer?"

  "Yes. You know - this treasure - it's a lot of money, Juan."

  "And we've no idea where to look for him," I said.

  "A pity Corjeag couldn't have finished what he was going to say."

  "There's one thing that might help. This was in his hand."

  She handed me a torn snapshot.

  "Suppose it's a clue. The murderer snatched it away and never noticed he'd left a corner of it behind. If we were to find the other half -"

  "To do that," I said, "we must find the second treasure. Let's look at this thing."

  "Hmm," I said, "there's nothing much to go by. That seems a kind of tower in the middle of the circle, but it would be very hard to identify."

  Fenella nodded.

  "Dr. Fayll has the important half. He knows where to look. We've got to find that man, Juan, and watch him. Of course, we won't let him see we suspect."

  "I wonder whereabouts in the island he is this minute. If we only knew -"

  My mind went back to the dying man. Suddenly I sat up excitedly.

  "Fenella," I said, "Corjeag wasn't Scotch?"

  "No, of course not."

  "Well, then, don't you see? What he meant, I mean?"

  "No?"

  I scribbled something on a piece of paper and tossed it to her.

  "What's this?"

  "The name of a firm that might help us."

  "Bellman and True. Who are they? Lawyers?"

  "No - they're more in our line - private detectives."

  And I proceeded to explain.

  "Dr. Fayll to see you," said Mrs. Skillicorn.

  We looked at each other. Twenty-four hours had elapsed. We had returned from our quest successful for the second time. Not wishing to draw attention to ourselves, we had journeyed in the Snaefell - a charabanc.

  "I wonder if he knows we saw him in the distance?" murmured Fenella.

  "It's extraordinary. If it hadn't been for the hint that photograph gave us - "

  "Hush - and do be careful, Juan. He must be simply furious at our having outwitted him in spite of everything."

  No trace of it appeared in the doctor's manner, however. He entered the room his urbane and charming self, and I felt my faith in Fenella's theory dwindling.

  "What a shocking tragedy!" he said. "Poor Corjeag. I suppose he was well - trying to steal a march on us. Retribution was swirl. Well, well we scarcely knew him, poor fellow. You must have wondered why I didn't turn up this morning as arranged. I got a fake message -

  Corjeag's doing, I suppose - it sent me off on a wild-goose chase right across the island. And now you two have romped home again. How do you do it?"

  There was a note of really eager inquiry in his voice which did not escape me.

  "Cousin Ewan was fortunately able to speak just before he died," said Fenella.

  I was watching the man, and I could swear I saw alarm leap into his eyes at her words.

  "Eh - eh? What's that?" he said.

  "He was just able to give us a clue as to the whereabouts of the treasure," explained Fenella.

  "Oh! I see - I see. I've been clean out of things - though, curiously enough, I myself was in that part of the island. You may have seen me strolling round."

  "We were so busy," said Fenella apologetically.

  "Of course, of course. You must have run across the thing more or less by accident. Lucky young people, aren't you? Well, what's the next program? Will Mrs. Skillicorn oblige us with the new clues?"

  But it seemed that this third set of clues had been deposited with the lawyer, and we all three repaired to the lawyer's office, where the sealed envelopes were handed over to us.

  The contents were simple. A map with a certain area marked off on it, and a paper of directions attached.

  In '85, this place made history.

  11 paces from the landmark to The east, then an equal ten Places north. Stand there Looking east. Two trees are in the Line of vision. One of them Was sacred in this island. Draw A circle five feet from The Spanish chestnut and, With head bent, walk round. Look well. You'll find.

  "Looks as though we are going to tread on each other's toes a bit today," commented the doctor.

  True to my policy of apparent friendliness, I offered him a lift in our car, which he accepted. We had lunch at Port Erin, and then started on our search.

  I had debated in my own mind the reason of my uncle's depositing this particular set of clues with his lawyer. Had he foreseen the possibility of a theft? And had he determined that not more than one set of clues should fall into the thief's possession?

  The treasure hunt this afternoon was not without its humor. The area of search was limited and we were continually in sight of each other.

  We eyed each other suspiciously, each trying to determine whether the other was further on or had had a brain wave.

  "This is all part of Uncle Myles's plan," said Fenella.

  "He wanted us to watch each other and go through all the agonies of thinking the other person was getting there."

  "Come," I said. "Let's get down to it scientifically. We've got one definite clue to start on. 'In '85 this place made history.' Look up the reference books we've got with us and see if we can't hunt that down.

  Once we get that -"

  "He's looking in that hedge," interrupted Fenella. "Oh! I can't bear it. If he's got it -"

  "Attend to me," I said firmly. "There's really only one way to go about it the proper way."

  "There are so few trees on the island that it would be much simpler just to look for a chestnut tree!" said Fenella.

  I pass over the next hour. We grew hot and despondent - and all the time we were tortured with fear that Fayll might be succeeding whilst we failed.

  "I remember once reading in a detective story," I said, "how a fellow stuck a paper of writing in a bath of acid - and all sorts of other words came out."

  "Do you think - but we haven't got a bath of acid!"

  "I don't think Uncle Myles could expect expert chemical knowledge.

  But there's common or garden heat -"

  We slipped round the corner of a hedge and in a minute or two I had kindled a few twigs. I held the paper as close to the blaze as I dared.

  Almost at once I was rewarded by seeing characters begin to appear at the foot of the sheet. There were just two words.

  "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 r
iting 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.

  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.
r />   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.