Freeman Wills Crofts - The Pit-Prop Syndicate

‘It was between five and six in the evening,’ he went on, and he told in some detail of his day’s run, culminating in his visit to the sawmill and his discovery of the alteration in the number of the lorry. He gave the facts exactly as they had occurred, with the single exception that he made no mention of his meeting with Madeleine Coburn.

‘And what happened?’ asked Drake, another of the men, when he had finished.

‘Nothing more happened,’ Merriman returned. ‘The manager came and gave me some petrol, and I cleared out. The point is, why should that number plate have been changed?’

Jelfs fixed his eyes on the speaker, and gave the little sidelong nod which indicated to the others that another joke was about to be perpetrated.

‘You say,’ he asked impressively, ‘that the lorry was at first 4 and then 3. Are you sure you haven’t made a mistake of 41?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean that it’s a common enough phenomenon for a No. 4 lorry to change, after lunch, let us say, into No. 44. Are you sure it wasn’t 44?’

Merriman joined in the laugh against him.

‘It wasn’t forty-anything, you old blighter,’ he said good-humouredly. ‘It was 4 on the road, and 3 at the mill, and I’m as sure of it as that you’re an amiable imbecile.’

‘Inconclusive,’ murmured Jelfs, ‘entirely inconclusive. But,’ he persisted, ‘you must not hold back material evidence. You haven’t told us yet what you had at lunch.’

‘Oh, stow it, Jelfs,’ said Hilliard, a thin-faced, eager looking young man who had not yet spoken. ‘Have you no theory yourself, Merriman?’

‘None. I was completely puzzled. I would have mentioned it before only it seemed to be making a mountain out of nothing.’

‘I think Jelf’s question should be answered, you know,’ Drake said critically, and after some more good-natured chaff the subject dropped.

Shortly after one of the men had to leave to catch his train, and the party broke up. As they left the building Merriman found Hilliard at his elbow.

‘Are you walking?’ the latter queried. ‘If so I’ll come along.’

Claud Hilliard was the son of a clergyman in the Midlands, a keen, not to say brilliant student who had passed through both school and college with distinction, and was already at the age of eight-and-twenty making a name for himself on the headquarters staff of the Customs Department. His thin, eager face, with its hooked nose, pale blue eyes and light, rather untidy looking hair, formed a true index of his nimble, somewhat speculative mind. What he did, he did with his might. He was keenly interested in whatever he took up, showing a tendency, indeed, to ride his hobbies to death. He had a particular penchant for puzzles of all kinds, and many a knotty problem brought to him as a last court of appeal received a surprisingly rapid and complete solution. His detractors, while admitting his ingenuity and the almost uncanny rapidity with which he seized on the essential facts of a case, said he was lacking in staying power, but if this were so, he had not as yet shown signs of it.

He and Merriman had first met on business, when Hilliard was sent to the wine merchants on some matter of Customs. The acquaintanceship thus formed had ripened into a mild friendship, though the two had not seen a great deal of each other.

They passed up Coventry Street and across the Circus into Piccadilly. Hilliard had a flat in a side street off Knightsbridge, while Merriman lived farther west in Kensington. At the door of his flat Hilliard stopped.

‘Come in for a last drink, won’t you?’ he invited. ‘It’s ages since you’ve been here.’

Merriman agreed, and soon the two friends were seated at another open window in the small, but comfortable sitting-room of the flat.

They chatted for some time, and then Hilliard turned the conversation to the story Merriman had told in the club.

‘You know,’ he said, knocking the ash carefully off his cigar, ‘I was rather interested in that tale of yours. It’s quite an intriguing little mystery. I suppose it’s not possible that you could have made a mistake about those numbers?’

Merriman laughed.

‘I’m not exactly infallible, and I have, once or twice in my life, made mistakes. But I don’t think I made one this time. You see, the only question is the number at the bridge. The number at the mill is certain. My attention was drawn to it, and I looked at it too often for there to be the slightest doubt. It was No. 3 as certainly as that I’m alive. But the number at the bridge is different. There was nothing to draw my attention to it, and I only glanced at it casually. I would say that I was mistaken about it only for one thing. It was a black figure on a polished brass ground, and I particularly remarked that the black lines were very wide, leaving an unusually small brass triangle in the centre. If I noticed that, it must have been a 4.’

Hilliard nodded.

‘Pretty conclusive, I should say.’ He paused for a few moments, then moved a little irresolutely. ‘Don’t think me impertinent, old man,’ he went on with a sidelong glance, ‘but I imagined from your manner you were holding something back. Is there more in the story than you told?’

It was now Merriman’s turn to hesitate. Although Madeleine Coburn had been in his thoughts more or less continuously since he returned to town, he had never mentioned her name, and he was not sure that he wanted to now.

‘Sorry I spoke, old man,’ Hilliard went on. ‘Don’t mind answering.’

Merriman came to a decision.

‘Not at all,’ he answered slowly. ‘I’m a fool to make any mystery of it. I’ll tell you. There is a girl there, the manager’s daughter. I met her in the lane when I was following the lorry, and asked her about petrol. She was frightfully decent; came back with me and told her father what I wanted, and all that. But, Hilliard, here’s the point. She knew ! There’s something, and she knows it too. She got quite scared when that driver fixed me with his eyes, and tried to get me away, and she was quite unmistakably relieved when the incident passed. Then later her father suggested she should see me to the road, and on the way I mentioned the thing—said I was afraid I had upset the driver somehow—and she got embarrassed at once, told me the man was shell-shocked, implying that he was queer, and switched off on to another subject so pointedly I had to let it go at that.’

Hilliard’s eyes glistened.

‘Quite a good little mystery,’ he said, ‘I suppose the man couldn’t have been a relation, or even her fiancé?’

‘That occurred to me, and it is possible. But I don’t think so. I believe she wanted to try to account for his manner, so as to prevent me smelling a rat.’

‘And did she not account for it?’

‘Perhaps she did, but again I don’t think so. I have a pretty good knowledge of shell-shock, as you know, and it didn’t look like it to me. I don’t suggest she wasn’t speaking the truth. I mean that this particular action didn’t seem to be so caused.’

There was silence for a moment and then Merriman continued:

‘There was another thing which might bear in the same direction, or again it may only be my imagination—I’m not sure of it. I told you the manager appeared just in the middle of the little scene, but I forgot to tell you that the driver went up to him and said something in a low tone, and the manager started and looked at me and seemed annoyed. But it was very slight and only for a second; I would have noticed nothing only for what went before. He was quite polite and friendly immediately after, and I may have been mistaken and imagined the whole thing.’

‘But it works in,’ Hilliard commented. ‘If the driver saw what you were looking at and your expression, he would naturally guess what you had noticed, and he would warn his boss that you had tumbled to it. The manager would look surprised and annoyed for a moment, then he would see he must divert your suspicion, and talk to you as if nothing had happened.’