The Pit-Prop Syndicate by Freeman Wills Crofts (readict books TXT) 📕

with the first, but all were strictly what they seemed, containing no secret receptacle.

“Merriman said they had six lorries,” Willis remarked. “I wonder where the sixth is.”

“At the distillery, don’t you think?” the Frenchman returned. “Those drops prove that manager fellow has just been unloading this one. I expect he does it every night. But if so, Raymond must load a vehicle every night too.”

“That’s true. We may assume the job is done every night, because Merriman watched Coburn come down here three nights running. It was certainly to unload the lorry.”

“Doubtless; and he probably came at two in the morning on account of his daughter.”

“That means there are two tank lorries,” Willis went on, continuing his own line of thought. “I say, Laroche, let’s mark this one so that we may know it again.”

They made tiny scratches on the paint at each corner of the big vehicle, then Willis turned back to the office.

“I’d like to find that cellar while we’re here,” he remarked. “We know there is a cellar, for those Customs men saw the Girondin loaded from it. We might have a look round for the entrance.”

Then ensued a search similar to that which Willis had carried out in the depot at Ferriby, except that in this case they found what they were looking for in a much shorter time. In the office was a flat roll-topped desk, with the usual set of drawers at each side of the central knee well, and when Willis found it was clamped to the floor he felt he need go no further. On the ground in the knee well, and projecting out towards the revolving chair in front, was a mat. Willis raised it, and at once observed a joint across the boards where in ordinary circumstances no joint should be. He fumbled and pressed and pulled, and in a couple of minutes he had the satisfaction of seeing the floor under the well rise and reveal the head of a ladder leading down into the darkness below.

“Here we are,” he called softly to Laroche, who was searching at the other side of the room.

The cellar into which the two detectives descended was lined with timber like that at Ferriby. Indeed the two were identical, except that only one passage⁠—that under the wharf⁠—led out of this one. It contained a similar large tun with a pipe leading down the passage under the wharf, on which was a pump. The only difference was in the connection of the pipes. At Ferriby the pump conveyed from the wharf to the tun, here it was from the tun to the wharf. The pipe from the garage came down through the ceiling and ran direct into the tun.

The two men walked down the passage towards the river. Here also the arrangement was the same as at Ferriby, and they remained only long enough for Willis to point out to the Frenchman how the loading apparatus was worked.

“Well,” said the former, as they returned to the office, “that’s not so bad for one day. I suppose it’s all we can do here. If we can learn as much at that distillery we shall soon have all we want.”

Laroche pointed to a chair.

“Sit down a moment,” he invited. “I have been thinking over that plan we discussed in the train, of searching the distillery at night, and I don’t like it. There are too many people about, and we are nearly certain to be seen. It’s quite different from working a place like this.”

“Quite,” Willis answered rather testily. “I don’t like it either, but what can we do?”

“I’ll tell you what I should do.” Laroche leaned forward and checked his points on his fingers. “That lorry had just been unloaded. It’s empty now, and if our theory is correct it will be taken to the distillery tomorrow and left there overnight to be filled up again. Isn’t that so?”

Willis nodded impatiently and the other went on:

“Now, it is clear that no one can fill up that tank without leaving fingerprints on the pipe connections in that secret box. Suppose we clean those surfaces now, and suppose we come back here the night after tomorrow, before the man here unloads, we could get the prints of the person who filled up in the distillery.”

“Well,” Willis asked sharply, “and how would that help us?”

“This way. Tomorrow you will be an English distiller with a forest you could get cheap near your works. You have an idea of running your stills on wood fires. You naturally call to see how M. Raymond does it, and you get shown over his works. You have prepared a plan of your proposals. You hand it to him when he can’t put it down on a desk. He holds it between his fingers and thumb, and eventually returns it to you. You go home and use powder. You have his fingerprints. You compare the two sets.”

Willis was impressed. The plan was simple, and it promised to gain for them all the information they required without recourse to a hazardous nocturnal visit to the distillery. But he wished he had thought of it himself.

“We might try it,” he admitted, without enthusiasm. “It couldn’t do much harm anyway.”

They returned to the garage, opened the secret lid beneath the lorry, and with a cloth moistened with petrol cleaned the fittings. Then after a look round to make sure that nothing had been disturbed, they let themselves out of the shed, regained the lane and their machine, and some forty minutes later were in Bordeaux.

On reconsideration they decided that as Raymond might have obtained Willis’s description from Captain Beamish, it would be wiser for Laroche to visit the distillery. Next morning, therefore, the latter bought a small writing block, and taking an inside leaf, which he carefully avoided touching with his hands, he drew a cross-section of a wood-burning firebox copied from an illustration in a book of reference in the city library, at the same