While the Light Lasts Read online

The sound she had caught came plainly to our ears. It was a groan and it came from outside. We went to the window and leaned out. There was a shrubbery growing against this side of the house and we could see nothing; but the groan came again, and we could see that the bushes seemed to have been disturbed and trampled.

  We hurried down and out round the house. The first thing we found was a fallen ladder, showing how the thieves had reached the window. A few steps further brought us to where a man was lying.

  He was a youngish man, dark, and he was evidently badly injured, for his head was lying in a pool of blood. I knelt down beside him.

  ‘We must get a doctor at once. I’m afraid he’s dying.’

  The gardener was sent off hurriedly. I slipped my hand into his breast pocket and brought out a pocket book. On it were the initials EC.

  ‘Ewan Corjeag,’ said Fenella.

  The man’s eyes opened. He said, faintly: ‘Fell from ladder…’ then lost consciousness again.

  Close by his head was a large jagged stone stained with blood.

  ‘It’s clear enough,’ I said. ‘The ladder slipped and he fell, striking his head on this stone. I’m afraid it’s done for him, poor fellow.’

  ‘So you think that was it?’ said Fenella, in an odd tone of voice.

  But at that moment the doctor arrived. He held out little hope of recovery. Ewan Corjeag was moved into the house and a nurse was sent for to take charge of him. Nothing could be done, and he would die a couple of hours later.

  We had been sent for and were standing by his bed. His eyes opened and flickered.

  ‘We are your cousins Juan and Fenella,’ I said. ‘Is there anything we can do?’

  He made a faint negative motion of the head. A whisper came from his lips. I bent to catch it.

  ‘Do you want the clue? I’m done. Don’t let Fayll do you down.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fenella. ‘Tell me.’

  Something like a grin came over his face.

  ‘D’ye ken–’ he began.

  Then suddenly his head fell over sideways and he died.

  V

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Fenella, suddenly.

  ‘What don’t you like?’

  ‘Listen, Juan. Ewan stole those clues–he admits falling from the ladder. Then where are they? We’ve seen all the contents of his pockets. There were three sealed envelopes, so Mrs Skillicorn says. Those sealed envelopes aren’t there.’

  ‘What do you think, then?’

  ‘I think there was someone else there, someone who jerked away the ladder so that he fell. And that stone–he never fell on it–it was brought from some distance away–I’ve found the mark. He was deliberately bashed on the head with it.’

  ‘But Fenella–that’s murder!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fenella, very white. ‘It’s murder. Remember, Dr Fayll never turned up at ten o’clock this morning. Where is he?’

  ‘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 might help. This was in his hand.’

  She handed me a torn snap-shot.†

  ‘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.’

  ‘H’m,’ 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.

  VI

  ‘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 swift. 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 programme? Will Mrs Skillicorn oblige us with the new clues?’

  But it seemed that this third set of clues had been deposited with the lawyers, 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.

  Ten paces from the landmark to

  The east, then an equal ten

  Paces 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 were 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 humour. The area of search was limited, and we were continually in sight of each other. We eyed each other suspiciously, e
ach trying to determine whether the other was farther 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 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:

  ‘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’

  ‘Post mark–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’s 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 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.

  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) an
d 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.