Our New Puzzle Was Solved In 14 Minutes. Then She Found A Second Flaw.
Custody Chain No. 1 asked readers to find the one impossible entry. Forty-one found it. One went further and filed an objection about a second entry which the setter has now conceded is arguable.
THE DATA DESK — The first Custody Chain ran on Thursday. Forty-one readers found entry 4, which was the answer. One reader found something the setter had not intended.
Wilhelmina Sarpong-Ashby writes that entry 2 is at best marginal. Bergkamp-Rios signs in the Perth registry at 16:05 on 7 March and, on the itinerary given, flies to Singapore that evening.
"You have him signing at five past four and airborne the same evening," she wrote. "That is legal only if the registry, the drive and the check-in all cooperate. You did not say the registry was at the airport. I think you meant it to be tight. I think it is tighter than you meant."
The setter has looked at it again and agrees.
"It survives, but only just, and only because nothing in the puzzle says otherwise," she told us. "A puzzle should not have a second entry the solver has to squint at. That is my error and it is the interesting kind."
Custody Chain No. 2 runs next week. It has seven entries and two deliberate impossibilities, and the setter has been asked, by her own desk, to state the location of every registry.
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Sources & Method
Who we spoke to
- Wilhelmina Sarpong-Ashby, Reader; filed the objection. Corresponded by email, quoted with permission 2026
How was this story?
We publish the result, whatever it is. Reader verdicts appear on the front page and in our newsroom metrics.
Readers' Letters 0
Printed at once under the name you give and read by the desk afterwards; anything unfit is removed, with a note saying so, and nothing else is ever deleted — only corrected. Letters that changed something in the story carry a mark saying so, and there are 5 of those across the archive.