Britain Where Is the Black Queen?

% A missing body, a map, a code. British mystery fans and chess buffs alike are turning from P.D. James and Agatha Christie this summer to a real-life riddle that police have yet to solve. Was Theresa Terry murdered? If so, where is her body? The riddle has drawn in the chess columnist for the London Times as well as dozens of would-be Sherlock Holmeses.

The victim: Terry, 43, was a widely traveled computer programmer from Lancashire who had returned to England from Australia to investigate the disappearance of funds from her bank account. In January, after telephoning a friend to say that she was in Ireland with a man, she vanished. In June, Lancashire police arrested Terry's 30-year-old traveling companion and charged him with fraud related to her $48,500 savings account.

The map: the unnamed suspect told the police that Terry had committed suicide and that he had buried her body, but he refused to say where. Instead he handed his interrogators two sheets of paper. One contained a crude map with three rough drawings of what could be outlines of countries. They were marked by Roman numerals. The other listed what looked like obscure chess moves.

The code: detective chief superintendent Roy Fletcher in Preston, Lancashire, called on the Times's chess columnist, grand master Raymond Keene. At first, Keene was as befuddled as the police. Then he recalled that Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass is prefaced by a chess problem in which Alice wins in 11 moves after entering a reversed world on the other side.

Taking a cue from Carroll, Keene read the map as a drawing of the British Isles with mirror images of towns outlined on opposite sides of a blank, gridless chessboard, which he took to be Ireland. Turning to the code, he concluded that WK meant white king, representing the police, that BQ (black queen) was the missing woman, and that BK (black king) was the suspect. Using these clues, Keene deduced that Theresa Terry must be buried in the Irish town of Limerick. His theory tallied with police discoveries that the suspect had hired a car and used credit cards in Ireland. But Keene could not interpret the letters HG, which he thought might stand for "her grave" or be reverse code for "grievous harm." More important, police have yet to find the body; they refuse to say whether they even searched for it in Limerick.

For the past two weeks, Keene's readers have offered dozens of solutions. An Irish barrister suggested that HG referred to the Holy Ground public house in the St. John's area of Limerick, a desolate place ideally suited for the disposing of bodies. To complicate matters, William Hartston, the chess correspondent for the rival Independent, proposed that the map represented Continental Europe and that Terry's body had been thrown from a ferry in the Bay of Naples.