---
title: "Six Signatures. One Of Them Is Impossible. Can You Find It?"
dek: "A new puzzle for the back of the book. You are given six custody entries for a single folder and the movements of the six people who signed them. Exactly one entry cannot have happened. Find it."
kind: puzzle (Puzzle)
desk: Culture
author: Nadia Ferreira-Ost (fictional)
published: 2026-09-04T14:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/chain-of-custody-no-1
tags: puzzle, logic, provenance
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# Six Signatures. One Of Them Is Impossible. Can You Find It?

*A new puzzle for the back of the book. You are given six custody entries for a single folder and the movements of the six people who signed them. Exactly one entry cannot have happened. Find it.*

A third puzzle joins the acrostic and the cryptogram, and it is the one this newspaper
should probably have run first, because it is the thing the documents desk does all day.

A custody chain is a list of who held a folder, where, and when. A forged chain almost
never fails on the signatures. It fails on the geography — somebody is recorded receiving
a folder in a place they could not have been.

Below is a chain of six entries. Below that, what we know about where each signatory was.
Exactly one entry is impossible. The other five are consistent.

You do not need any outside knowledge. Everything required is on this page.

## The chain

| # | Date | Received by | At | Signed |
|---|------|-------------|-----|--------|
| 1 | 3 Mar | R. Okonjo-Halstead | Perth registry | 09:40 |
| 2 | 7 Mar | T. Bergkamp-Rios | Perth registry | 16:05 |
| 3 | 11 Mar | A. Delacroix-Whitby | Singapore annex | 11:20 |
| 4 | 14 Mar | W. Oyelaran-Tasker | Singapore annex | 08:15 |
| 5 | 19 Mar | C. Adeyemi-Strand | Zurich store | 14:50 |
| 6 | 22 Mar | H. Oyelowo-Vasquez | Zurich store | 10:30 |

## What we know about the six

- **Okonjo-Halstead** was in Perth for the whole of March. He signs for a great many things
  and has never been anywhere interesting.
- **Bergkamp-Rios** flew Perth to Singapore on the evening of 7 March and did not return.
- **Delacroix-Whitby** was in Singapore from 9 March to 16 March, then Zurich from 18 March.
- **Oyelaran-Tasker** was in Zurich until the morning of 14 March, and in Singapore from
  the 15th.
- **Adeyemi-Strand** was in Zurich for the whole of March.
- **Oyelowo-Vasquez** was in Singapore until 20 March, then Zurich from the 21st.

## The rule

A folder cannot be received by someone who was not in that city on that date. It also
cannot be received in a city it has not yet travelled to — the chain runs in order, and a
folder in Zurich on the 19th cannot be back in Singapore on the 22nd.

## The answer

Entry **4**. Oyelaran-Tasker was in Zurich on the morning of 14 March and did not reach
Singapore until the 15th. She cannot have signed in the Singapore annex at 08:15 on the
14th.

Every other entry survives. Bergkamp-Rios signs in Perth at 16:05 on the 7th and flies that
evening, which is tight but legal. Delacroix-Whitby is in Singapore on the 11th and Zurich
from the 18th, so entry 3 holds and she is not needed again. Oyelowo-Vasquez reaches Zurich
on the 21st and signs on the 22nd, with a day to spare.

The reason this puzzle is worth setting is that entry 4 is the *only* one that looks
completely ordinary. It has a plausible name, a plausible time and the same city as the
entry above it. The impossible entry in a real forged chain is almost never the strange
one. It is the one that matches its neighbour.

*Custody Chain No. 2 runs next week and has seven entries and two impossibilities. One of
them is in the times.*

---
They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.