Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2015
We study the free Lie ring of rank $2$ in the variety of all centre-by-nilpotent-by-abelian Lie rings of derived length $3$. This is the quotient $L/([\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}_{c}(L^{\prime }),L]+L^{\prime \prime \prime })$ with $c\geqslant 2$ where $L$ is the free Lie ring of rank $2$, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}_{c}(L^{\prime })$ is the $c$th term of the lower central series of the derived ideal $L^{\prime }$ of $L$, and $L^{\prime \prime \prime }$ is the third term of the derived series of $L$. We show that the quotient $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}_{c}(L^{\prime })+L^{\prime \prime \prime }/[\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}_{c}(L^{\prime }),L]+L^{\prime \prime \prime }$ is a direct sum of a free abelian group and a torsion group of exponent $c$. We exhibit an explicit generating set for the torsion subgroup.