The Bloodhounds' riddles

The Bloodhounds' riddles are a three-part challenge associated with the theft of the Penny Black and the deaths investigated by Peter Diamond. They are significant both as clues and as instruments of deception: their carefully repeated form connects the crimes, while their double meanings invite the police to solve the wrong problem until the final riddle is read as a prediction of Rupert Darby's hanging.

A public challenge and a misleading trail

The riddles arrive amid an investigation already shaped by a seemingly impossible theft and a locked-room killing. When a new riddle reaches the press, it is reported in the Chronicle and has already appeared on the front page. Julie Hargreaves initially sees it as resembling the earlier riddles, which had concerned the Penny Black; she also believes the earlier evidence points to Sid Towers as their author. A paper bag containing a list of rhyming words, rather than completed verse, had seemed to her a persuasive trace of Sid's composition.

That reading soon becomes less secure. Peter Diamond tells Julie that the investigation has become a mass of conflicting evidence: an apparently impossible murder in a locked room, a dead man who continues to taunt the police through riddles, and unexplained financial withdrawals by Miss Chilmark. The riddles therefore do more than identify a common thread between incidents. They keep the inquiry moving while complicating the question of who is speaking, what the writer knows, and whether the message is a clue, a boast, or a deliberate effort to divert suspicion.

The first two riddles are associated with the Penny Black and the Bloodhounds, the group whose members become a closed circle of possible witnesses and suspects. Their allusive wording draws on recognizable places and puzzle conventions: one is linked to J.M.W.T. and security, while another asks, “Whither Victoria and with whom? The Grand Old Queen? / Look for the lady in the locked room at seventeen”. The references give the verses the character of intellectual tests, but their apparent invitation to decode a location or object does not by itself establish who wrote them or what the writer intended.

Form, circulation, and authorship

The third riddle strengthens the connection among the messages through its material presentation. Diamond notes that it is on similar paper, in an identical typeface, and distributed to the local media in the same way as the other two. That consistency undermines the idea that an unrelated publicity seeker has merely joined the story. The riddles have a shared public identity, even while their authorship remains contested.

The paper bag becomes a particularly effective false lead because its contents look like the beginnings of a poem. Diamond had treated the rhyming-word list as evidence that Sid was the poet behind the riddles and, by extension, might have stolen the Penny Black and engineered the locked-boat puzzle. He later recognizes that this conclusion depended on mistaking working material for proof of authorship. When he confronts Jessica Shaw, he reconstructs a different chain: the bag belonged to Sid, Sid passed it to Jessica, and Jessica passed it to Diamond. The hand-to-hand movement makes the object evidence of contact, but not the simple authorship evidence it first appeared to be.

The investigation also connects the making of the first riddle with Gilbert Jones. In Diamond's account, Jones devised the Penny Black theft to prove a point rather than to make a profit, composed the riddle on a computer at work, and printed it later when the office was empty. This practical account contrasts with the riddles' theatrical appearance as mysterious communications. Their literary pose conceals mundane production: a computer, a printer, and a writer choosing when and how the message will enter public circulation.

The third riddle and Rupert Darby's death

The third riddle's lines, “To end the suspense, as yours truly did, / Discover the way to Sydney from Sid,” acquire their full force after Rupert Darby is found hanging from a bridge in Sydney Gardens. Diamond explains the phrase as a double meaning. The discovery of Rupert's body ends the literal suspense of the hanging, while the wording also claims that the speaker has ended the suspense by solving the route from Sid to Sydney. What had looked like a taunt or puzzle thus reads as a forecast of a death.

The line about finding the way from Sid also exposes the cost of reading the riddle too narrowly. The police had taken the reference in the direction of the museum rather than the bridge, and Diamond considers whether closer attention to every word might have enabled them to anticipate where Rupert would be found. He does not claim that the wording made the solution easy: he acknowledges that penetrating it would have required the brilliance of the fictional detectives admired by the Bloodhounds. The riddle's clue is present, but its pun delays recognition rather than transparently announcing the outcome.

The same interpretation changes the suspected chronology. Diamond rejects John Wigfull's suggestion that Rupert devised the hanging only the previous evening. Because the riddle predicts the suspension and the discovery that ends it, Diamond concludes that the death was planned in advance. The apparent literary game therefore reaches beyond retrospective commentary: the verse is evidence that someone knew what was about to happen and shaped the investigation's expectations before the body was found.

Riddles as cover and as evidence

The messages participate in a larger performance of intellectual one-upmanship. Diamond's later reconstruction places the crimes in the context of a desire to impress Jessica Shaw: the Penny Black theft and its appearance at a Bloodhounds meeting are described as a spectacular demonstration of cleverness, followed by riddles and the manipulation of padlocks. In this account, the puzzle-making is not separate from the crimes. It gives them a showy design, making the culprit's ingenuity visible while also furnishing investigators with misleading routes through the evidence.

That performance turns dangerous when Sid Towers investigates the locked-room puzzle for himself. Diamond believes Sid, a devotee of locked-room mysteries, went to examine the narrowboat and encountered the person replacing the padlock. The encounter, in Diamond's reconstruction, ended with Sid being struck with a windlass; the acts that followed were efforts to cover up the killing. The riddles had invited Sid and the Bloodhounds to treat a crime as a puzzle, but the real-world stakes were not governed by the fair boundaries of detective fiction.

The final use of the riddle form is more openly accusatory. After Rupert's death, another message, supposedly written by Rupert and predicting his suicide, helps make his death appear to close the case and cast him as Sid's killer. The phrase “She did for Sid” likewise points suspicion toward Jessica, though Diamond considers that the accusation may have been written to make the police believe she was responsible. Together, these messages show how a clue can also be planted evidence: their apparent revelations direct attention toward a culprit who may have been selected precisely to protect the actual one.

The riddles' importance lies in this unstable relation between solution and misdirection. Their repeated paper, typeface, and route to the press connect them; their puns reward close reading; and their apparent authorship repeatedly shifts as the paper bag and the deaths are reconsidered. What begins as a clever challenge to the Bloodhounds becomes part of a scheme that frames people, conceals violence, and attempts to declare the case finished. Diamond's progress depends not on treating each verse as a self-sufficient puzzle, but on asking who benefits from its performance and what real act its words are meant to obscure.