Seven Signatures. Two Are Impossible. One Of Them Is Only The Clock.

Custody Chain No. 1 gave six entries and hid one impossible signature among them. Forty-one readers found it. Wilhelmina Sarpong-Ashby found a second problem the setter had not put there — an entry that survived only because the puzzle never said whether the registry was at the airport or in the town.

So this week every registry comes with its address. That is not decoration. One of the two impossibilities below cannot be seen without it.

Seven entries. Two of them cannot have happened. One fails on geography. The other fails only on the clock.

The registries

• Perth registry — city centre, twenty minutes from the airport.
• Singapore annex — inside the airport's cargo terminal. No transfer time.
• Zurich store — city centre, fifteen minutes from the airport.
• Lisbon office — city centre, thirty minutes from the airport.

Zurich to Lisbon is a two-hour-forty-five-minute flight. Nothing else in this puzzle turns on a flight time.

The chain

Where the seven were

• Okonjo-Halstead was in Perth for the whole of April. He is in this puzzle for the same reason he was in the last one, which is that he signs for everything and goes nowhere.
• Trelawny-Boye was in Perth from 2 to 6 April.
• Delacroix-Whitby was in Singapore from 7 to 14 April.
• Vandenbroucke-Ige was in Zurich until 12 April and in Singapore from 13 April.
• Adeyemi-Strand was in Zurich for the whole of April.
• Sarpong-Ashby was in Lisbon from 14 April.
• Oyelowo-Vasquez was in Lisbon from 18 April.

The rules

A folder cannot be received by someone who was not in that city that day. It cannot arrive somewhere before it has physically got there. And the chain runs in order.

The answers

Entry 4 fails on geography. Vandenbroucke-Ige was in Zurich until 12 April and did not reach Singapore until the 13th. She cannot have signed in the Singapore annex on the 12th. This is the same shape as last week's answer and most solvers will find it first.

Entry 6 fails on the clock, and only on the clock. Every person in it is in the right place: Sarpong-Ashby has been in Lisbon since 14 April, so the signature is unremarkable. The folder is the problem. It was in the Zurich store, in the city centre, at 08:50. Fifteen minutes to the airport, a two-hour-forty-five-minute flight, thirty minutes from the Lisbon airport into town: three hours thirty at the very best, and that assumes an aircraft waiting with its door open. The folder cannot be in Lisbon before 12:20. It is signed for at 11:30.

Nobody in entry 6 is lying about where they were. The entry is impossible anyway.

That is the whole reason the addresses are printed this week. Put the Zurich store at the airport and entry 6 becomes merely tight. Put the Singapore annex in the town and entry 3 becomes questionable too. A custody chain that does not say where its registries are is not checkable, and a great many real ones do not say.

Custody Chain No. 3 has eight entries and one impossibility, and the impossibility is in a date nobody thinks to check.