To celebrate Conundrum's new look for Christmas, we offered a bonus challenge for everyone. No correct answers were received by the close at 12 noon UK time on 15 December. But you can still have a go, checking out hints and solutions below.
A spy has been given four Christmas-themed clues to establish the address, time and date of a secret meeting. There are four clues because one piece of information is enciphered, and one of the other solutions is the key. The key is an English word, not random letters. You may wish to download our key cipher spreadsheet.
Clue 1: Drummers' day.
Clue 2: Village where a warlock started for Bethlehem. Down the pub: where a lost plough is replaced by a nautical vessel.
Clue 3: We have intercepted an email to the spy with a link to an Apple Music playlist. This appears to contained concealed information.
Clue 4: We have also intercepted an email that includes the Amazon wish list below. This is also thought to contain hidden information in a variant of the method using book spines. To read such a message you need to take a letter from the same position (e.g. the last letter of the book’s title or the first letter of the publisher’s name) from each book in turn. From previous examples we know this sender prefers to use a first letter.
