The Pit Prop Syndicate by Freeman Wills Crofts (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📕

Merriman was awakened in the early hours of the following morning by a push on the shoulder and, opening his eyes, he was amazed to see Hilliard, dressed only in his pajamas, leaning over him. On his friend's face was an expression of excitement and delight which made him a totally different man from the gloomy pessimist of the previous day.

“Merriman, old man,” he cried, though in repressed tones—it was only a little after five—“I'm frightfully sorry to stir you up, but I just couldn't help it. I say, you and I are a nice pair of idiots!”

Merriman grunted.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he murmured sleepily.

“Talking about?” Hilliard returned eagerly. “Why, this affair, of course! I see it now, but what I don't see is how we missed it before. The idea struck me like a flash. Just while you'd wink I saw the whole thing!”

Merriman, now thoroughly aroused, moved with some annoyance.

“For Heaven's sake, explain yourself,” he demanded. “What whole thing?”

“How they do it. We thought it was brandy smuggling but we couldn't see how it was done. Well, I see now. It's brandy smuggling right enough, and we'll get them this time. We'll get them, Merriman, we'll get them yet.”

Hilliard was bubbling over with excitement. He could not remain still, but began to pace up and down the room. His emotion was infectious, and Merriman began to feel his heart beat quicker as he listened.

Hilliard went on:

“We thought there might be brandy, in fact we couldn't suggest anything else. But we didn't see any brandy; we saw pit-props. Isn't that right?”

“Well?” Merriman returned impatiently. “Get on. What next?”

“That's all,” Hilliard declared with a delighted laugh. “That's the whole thing. Don't you see it now?”

Merriman felt his anger rising.

“Confound it all, Hilliard,” he protested. “If you haven't anything better to do than coming round wakening—”

“Oh, don't get on your hind legs,” Hilliard interrupted with another ecstatic chuckle. “What I say is right-enough. Look here, it's perfectly simple. We thought brandy would be unloaded! And what's more, we both sat in that cursed barrel and watched it being done! But all we saw coming ashore was pit-props, Merriman, pit-props! Now don't you see?”

Merriman suddenly gasped.

“Lord!” he cried breathlessly. “It was in the props?”

“Of course it was in the props!” Hilliard repeated triumphantly. “Hollow props; a few hollow ones full of brandy to unload in their shed, many genuine ones to sell! What do you think of that, Merriman? Got them at last, eh?”

Merriman lay still as he tried to realize what this idea involved. Hilliard, moving jerkily about the room as if he were a puppet controlled by wires, went on speaking.

“I thought it out in bed before I came along. All they'd have to do would be to cut the props in half and bore them out, attaching a screwed ring to one half and a screwed socket to the other so that they'd screw together like an ordinary gas thimble. See?”

Merriman nodded.

“Then they'd get some steel things like oxygen gas cylinders to fit inside. They'd be designed of such a thickness that their weight would be right; that their weight plus the brandy would be equal to the weight of the wood bored out.”

He paused and looked at Merriman. The latter nodded again.

“The rest would be as easy as tumbling off a log. At night Coburn and company would screw off the hollow ends, fill the cylinders with brandy, screw on the end again, and there you have your props—harmless, innocent props—ready for loading up on the Girondin. Of course, they'd have them marked. Then when they're being unloaded that manager would get the marked ones put aside—they could somehow be defective, too long or too short or too thin or too anything you like—he would find some reason for separating them out—and then at night he would open the things and pour out the brandy, screw them up again and—there you are!”

Hilliard paused dramatically, like a conjurer who has just drawn a rabbit from a lady's vanity bag.

“That would explain that Ferriby manager sleeping in the shed,” Merriman put in.

“So it would. I hadn't thought of that.”

“And,” Merriman went on, “there'd be enough genuine props carried on each trip to justify the trade.”

“Of course. A very few faked ones would do all they wanted—say two or three per cent. My goodness, Merriman, it's a clever scheme; they deserve to win. But they're not going to.” Again he laughed delightedly.

Merriman was thinking deeply. He had recovered his composure, and had begun to weigh the idea critically.

“They mightn't empty the brandy themselves at all,” he said slowly. “What's to prevent them running the faked props to the firm who plants the brandy?”

“That's true,” Hilliard returned. “That's another idea. My eyes, what possibilities the notion has!”

They talked on for some moments, then Hilliard, whose first excitement was beginning to wane, went back to his room for some clothes. In a few minutes he returned full of another side of the idea.

“Let's just work out,” he suggested, “how much you could put into a prop. Take a prop say nine inches in diameter and nine feet long. Now you can't weaken it enough to risk its breaking if it accidentally falls. Suppose you bored a six-inch hole down its center. That would leave the sides one and half inches thick, which should be ample. What do you think?”

“Take it at that anyway,” answered Merriman.

“Very well. Now how long would it be? If we bore too deep a hole we may split the prop. What about two feet six inches into each end? Say a five-foot tube?”

“Take it at that,” Merriman repeated.

“How much brandy could you put into a six-inch tube, five feet long?” He calculated aloud, Merriman checking each step. “That works out at a cubic foot of brandy, six and a quarter gallons, fifty pints or four hundred glasses-four hundred glasses per prop.”

He paused, looked at his friend, and resumed:

“A glass of brandy in France costs you sixpence; in England it costs you half-a-crown. Therefore, if you can smuggle the stuff over you make a profit of two shillings a glass. Four hundred glasses at two shillings. There's a profit of 40 pounds per prop, Merriman!”

Merriman whistled. He was growing more and more impressed. The longer he considered the idea, the more likely it seemed. He listened eagerly as Hilliard, once again excitedly pacing the room, resumed his calculations.

“Now you have a cargo of about seven thousand props. Suppose you assume one per cent of them are faked, that would be seventy. We don't know how many they have, of course, but one out of every hundred is surely a conservative figure. Seventy props means 2,800 pounds profit per trip. And they have a trip every ten days—say thirty trips a year to be on the safe side—84,000 pounds a year profit! My eyes, Merriman, it would be worth running some risks for 84,000 a year!”

“Risks?” cried Merriman, now as much excited as his friend. “They'd risk hell for it! I bet, Hilliard, you've got it at last. 84,000 pounds a year! But look here,”—his voice changed—“you have to divide it among the members.”

“That's true, you have,” Hilliard admitted, “but even so—how many are there? Beamish, Bulla, Coburn, Henri, the manager here, and the two men they spoke of, Morton and Archer—that makes seven. That would give them 12,000 a year each. It's still jolly well worth while.”

“Worth while? I should just say so.” Merriman lay silently pondering the idea. Presently he spoke again.

“Of course those figures of yours are only guesswork.”

“They're only guesswork,” Hilliard agreed with a trace of impatience in his manner, “because we don't know the size of the tubes and the number of the props, but it's not guesswork that they can make a fortune out of smuggling in that way. We see now that the thing can be done, and how it can be done. That's something gained anyway.”

Merriman nodded and sat up in bed.

“Hand me my pipe and baccy out of that coat pocket like a good man,” he asked, continuing slowly:

“It'll be some job, I fancy, proving it. We shall have to see first if the props are emptied at that depot, and if not we shall have to find out where they're sent, and investigate. I seem to see a pretty long program opening out. Have you any plans?”

“Not a plan,” Hilliard declared cheerfully. “No time to make 'em yet. But we shall find a way somehow.”

They went on discussing the matter in more detail. At first the testing of Hilliard's new theory appeared a simple matter, but the more they thought it over the more difficult it seemed to become. For one thing there would be the investigations at the depot. Whatever unloading of the brandy was carried on there would probably be done inside the shed and at night. It would therefore be necessary to find some hiding place within the building from which the investigations could be made. This alone was an undertaking bristling with difficulties. In the first place, all the doors of the shed were locked and none of them opened without noise. How were they without keys to open the doors in the dark, silently and without leaving traces? Observations might be required during the entire ten-day cycle, and that would mean that at some time each night one of these doors would have to be opened and shut to allow the watcher to be relieved. And if the emptying of the props were done at night how were they to ensure that this operation should not coincide with the visit of the relief? And this was all presupposing that a suitable hiding place could be found inside the building in such a position that from it the operations in question could be overlooked.

Here no doubt were pretty serious obstacles, but even were they all successfully overcome it did not follow that they would have solved the problem. The faked props might be loaded up and forwarded to some other depot, and, if so, this other depot might be by no means easy to find. Further, if it were found, nocturnal observation of what went on within would then become necessary.

It seemed to the friends that all they had