The second Penny Black riddle

The second Penny Black riddle turns a stolen stamp into a public puzzle: sent anonymously to BBC Radio Bristol, it asks listeners to connect Victoria with a locked room and the number seventeen. The verse draws the police and the Bloodhounds into renewed interpretation, then gains a concrete echo when the Penny Black is found among the pages of Chapter Seventeen in Milo Motion's copy of The Hollow Man.

Delivery and Public Broadcast

The riddle arrives as a sheet of A4 paper with no accompanying note, in the afternoon post. Before broadcasting it, the producer diplomatically phones the Bath police. After the four o'clock news headlines, the presenter introduces the verse as a possible continuation of the cryptic poem broadcast the previous Monday, which the police had since linked almost certainly to the million-pound theft of the Penny Black from the Bath Postal Museum. The presenter frames it as a possible clue rather than an established solution, and invites listeners to consider whether it is a hoax.

That uncertainty is part of the event's public character. The presenter promises to hand the note to the police, but also emphasizes that listeners are hearing it first on Radio Bristol and offers to pass on their suggestions. The clue is therefore both an investigative lead and a broadcast challenge: information that might help recover a famous stamp is made available as a puzzle for a listening audience.

The police control room is already tuned in when the verse is read, and the whole room hears it, including Peter Diamond. John Wigfull is the only notable absentee from that group, listening privately on a separate radio upstairs. A detective sergeant's morose observation that the affair is becoming like party games captures the shift in tone: the investigation now has to contend not just with a theft, but with an offender who communicates through puzzles and a wider public invited to solve them.

The Clue and Its Competing Readings

The verse asks where Victoria is going and with whom, invokes the Grand Old Queen, and directs its audience to look for a lady in a locked room at seventeen. Its compressed form puts several possible references in play without explaining their connection. Victoria can suggest the queen pictured on the Penny Black; the mention of a locked room evokes the classic detective-fiction puzzle; and seventeen supplies a specific number whose significance remains uncertain at first.

At a special meeting convened by the Assistant Chief Constable, senior staff pool their knowledge on the assumption that, like the first riddle, this one may depend on knowledge of Bath. The room is short on confidence, and Wigfull, whose inquiry it is, offers an immediate interpretation: he assumes that Victoria refers to the cover. The response asking him to clarify shows how little the verse settles on its own. Even a plausible association does not yet explain the locked room or the number.

The riddle is later read aloud by Miss Chilmark. Jessica distinguishes the earlier clue from the new one: police had been tipped off about a supposed plan to steal a Turner from the Victoria Gallery, prompting doubled security, but that threat was a bluff and the real target was the stamp. Against that background, the new verse is treated as the more demanding challenge. The contrast links the riddles while warning that an apparent target may be a decoy.

The Seventeenth Chapter

The number seventeen acquires a striking context during a gathering of the Bloodhounds in the crypt of the Church of St. Michael with St. Paul. Milo Motion has chosen Chapter Seventeen of his copy of The Hollow Man, a chapter entitled The Locked-Room Lecture, for a reading about the locked-room mystery. His imagined ideal setting is an after-dinner room with a lamp, empty wine bottles, coffee, and snow beyond the windows; the church crypt is his less conventional alternative.

As Milo opens the book, he turns to the chapter and notices an envelope between its pages, wondering aloud how it came to be used as a bookmark. The envelope is yellow with age, bears a faded address in copperplate, and has a black Queen Victoria Penny Black affixed to it. The stamp carries a PAID cancellation, with a remarkably clear postmark below and to the right. In that scene, the riddle's number and locked-room language converge with the object the investigation seeks: the stamp is encountered inside the seventeenth chapter during a lecture devoted to locked rooms.

Function in the Mystery

The verse does not state its solution, and its clues remain open to interpretation when first broadcast. Its effect depends on the gap between recognition and explanation: Victoria points toward the stamp, while the locked room and seventeen invite the listeners, police, and readers to look for a more particular setting. The later discovery gives those terms a concrete correspondence without making the broadcast itself a full account of how the stamp came to be there.

The episode also changes the scale of the investigation. The first riddle had already connected the cryptic campaign to the museum theft; the second is heard simultaneously by radio listeners and police personnel, discussed at a senior meeting, and repeated aloud among the Bloodhounds. Its route from anonymous post to broadcast to shared scrutiny makes interpretation part of the plot. The stamp's appearance in a chapter about locked-room puzzles sharpens the irony: a literary discussion of an apparently sealed mystery becomes the setting in which the missing Penny Black is physically revealed.