The Pit Prop Syndicate Part 42

"I'm Inspector Willis from Scotland Yard," he said with a sharpness strangely at variance with his usual easy-going mode of address.

"See here." He showed his credentials, at which the manager bowed obsequiously. "I am following that gentleman who was in here inquiring about a room a few minutes ago. I want to know what pa.s.sed between you."

The manager, who was a sly, evil-looking person seemingly of Eastern blood, began to hedge, but Willis cut him short with scant ceremony.

"Now look here, my friend," he said brusquely, "I haven't time to waste with you. That man that you were talking to is wanted for murder, and what you have to decide is whether you're going to act with the police or against them. If you give us any, trouble you may find yourself in the dock as an accomplice after the fact. In any case it's not healthy for a man in your position to run up against the police."

His bluff had more effect that it might have had with an Englishman in similar circ.u.mstances, and the manager became polite and anxious to a.s.sist. Yes, the gentleman had come about a room. He had ordered lunch in a private room for a party of seven for 1.30 on the following Tuesday. He had been very particular about the room, had insisted on seeing it, and had approved of it. It appeared the party had some business to discuss after lunch, and the gentleman had required a guarantee that they would not be interrupted. The gentleman had given his name as Mr. Hodgson. The price had been agreed on.

Willis in his turn demanded to see the room, and he was led upstairs to a small and rather dark chamber, containing a fair-sized oval table surrounded by red plush chairs, a red plush sofa along one side, and a narrow sideboard along another. The walls supported tawdry and dilapidated decorations, in which beveled mirrors and faded gilding bore a prominent part. Two large but quite worthless oil paintings hung above the fireplace and the sideboard respectively, and the window was covered with gelatine paper simulating stained gla.s.s.

Inspector Willis stood surveying the scene with a frown on his brow. How on earth was he to secrete himself in this barely furnished apartment?

There was not room under the sofa, still less beneath the sideboard.

Nor was there any adjoining room or cupboard in which he could hide, his keen ear pressed to the keyhole. It seemed to him that in this case he was doing nothing but coming up against one insoluble problem after another. Ruefully he recalled the conversation in Archer's study, and he decided that, whatever it cost in time and trouble, there must be no repet.i.tion of that fiasco.

He stood silently pondering over the problem, the manager obsequiously bowing and rubbing his hands. And then the idea for which he was hoping flashed into his mind. He walked to the wall behind the sideboard and struck it sharply. It rang hollow.

"A part.i.tion?" he asked. "What is behind it?"

"Anozzer room, sair. A private room, same as dees."

"Show it to me."

The "ozzer room" was smaller, but otherwise similar to that they had just left. The doors of the two rooms were beside each other, leading on to the same pa.s.sage.

"This will do," Willis declared. "Now look here, Mr. Manager, I wish to overhear the conversation of your customers, and I may or may not wish to arrest them. You will show them up and give them lunch exactly as you have arranged. Some officers from the Yard and myself will previously have hidden ourselves in here. See?"

The manager nodded.

"In the meantime I shall send a carpenter and have a hole made in that part.i.tion between the two rooms, a hole about two feet by one, behind the upper part of that picture that hangs above the sideboard. Do you understand?"

The manager wrung his hands.

"Ach!" he cried. "But meine Zimmern! Mine rooms, zey veel pe deestroyed!"

"Your rooms will be none the worse," Willis declared. "I will have the damage made good, and I shall pay you reasonably well for everything.

You'll not lose if you act on the square, but if not--" he stared aggressively in the other's face--"if the slightest hint of my plan reaches any of the men--well, it will be ten years at least."

"It shall be done! All shall happen as you say!"

"It had better," Willis rejoined, and with a menacing look he strode out of the restaurant.

"The Gresham Hotel," he called to his driver, as he reentered his taxi.

His manner to the manageress of the Bedford Square hotel was very different from that displayed to the German. Introducing himself as an inspector from the Yard, he inquired the purpose of Archer's call.

Without hesitation he was informed. The distiller had engaged a private sitting-room for a business interview which was to take place at eleven o'clock on the following Tuesday between a Miss Coburn, a Mr. Merriman, and a Captain Beamish.

"So far so good," thought Willis exultingly, as he drove off. "They're walking into the trap! I shall have them all. I shall have them in a week."

At the Yard he dismissed his taxi, and on reaching his room he found the letter he was expecting from Madeleine. It contained that from Beamish, and the latter ran:

"FERRIBY, YORKS,

"Sat.u.r.day.

"DEAR Miss COBURN,-I have just received your letter of 25th inst., and I hasten to reply.

"I am deeply grieved to learn that you consider yourself badly treated by the members of the syndicate, and I may say at once that I feel positive that any obligations which they may have contracted will be immediately and honorably discharged.

"It is, however, news to me that your late father was a partner, as I always imagined that he held his position as I do my own, namely, as a salaried official who also receives a bonus based on the profits of the concern.

"With regard to the notes you have found on the operations of the syndicate, it is obvious that these must be capable of a simple explanation, as there was nothing in the operations complicated or difficult to understand.

"I shall be very pleased to fall in with your SUGGESTION that we should meet and discuss the points at issue, and I would suggest 11 a.m. on Tuesday, 10th prox., at the Gresham Hotel in Bedford Square, if this would suit you.

"With kind regards,

"Yours sincerely,

"WALTER BEAMISH."

Willis smiled as he read this effusion. It was really quite well worded, and left the door open for any action which the syndicate might decide on. "Ah, well, my friend," he thought grimly, "you'll get a little surprise on Tuesday. You'll find Miss Coburn is not to be caught as easily as you think. Just you wait and see."

For the next three or four days Willis busied himself in preparing for his great coup. First he went down again to EASTBOURNE via Brighton, and coached Madeleine and Merriman in the part they were to play in the coming interview. Next he superintended the making of the hole through the wall dividing the two private rooms at the Cranbourne Street restaurant, and drilled the party of men who were to occupy the annex.

To his unbounded satisfaction, he found that every word uttered at the table in the larger room was audible next door to anyone standing at the aperture. Then he detailed two picked men to wait within call of the private room at the Gresham during the interview between Madeleine and Beamish. Finally, all his preparations in London complete, he returned to Hull, and set himself, by means of the secret telephone, to keep in touch with the affairs of the syndicate.

CHAPTER 20. THE DOUBLE CROSS

Inspector Willis spent the Sat.u.r.day before the fateful Tuesday at the telephone in the empty cottage. Nothing of interest pa.s.sed over the wire, except that Benson informed his chief that he had had a telegram from Beamish saying that, in order to reach Ferriby at the prearranged hour, he was having to sail without a full cargo of props, and that the two men went over again the various trains by which they and their confederates would travel to London. Both items pleased Willis, as it showed him that the plans originally made were being adhered to.

On Monday morning, as the critical hour of his coup approached, he became restless and even nervous--so far, that is, as an inspector of the Yard on duty can be nervous. So much depended on the results of the next day and a half! His own fate hung in the balance as well as that of the men against whom he had pitted himself; Miss Coburn and Merriman too would be profoundly affected however the affair ended, while to his department, and even to the nation at large, his success would not be without importance.

He determined he would, if possible, see the various members of the gang start, travelling himself in the train with Archer, as the leader and the man most urgently "wanted." Benson, he remembered, was to go first.

Willis therefore haunted the Paragon station, watching the trains leave, and he was well satisfied when he saw Benson get on board the 9.10 a.m. By means of a word of explanation and the pa.s.sing of a couple of shillings, he induced an official to examine the traveller's ticket, which proved to be a third return to King's Cross.

Beamish and Bulla were to travel by the 4 p.m., and Willis, carefully disguised as a deep-sea fisherman, watched them arrive separately, take their tickets, and enter the train. Beamish travelled first, and Bulla third, and again the inspector had their tickets examined, and found they were for London.

Archer was to leave at 5.3, and Willis intended as a precautionary measure to travel up with him and keep him under observation. Still in his fisherman's disguise, he took his own ticket, got into the rear of the train, and kept his eye on the platform until he saw Archer pa.s.s, suitcase and rug in hand. Then cautiously looking out, he watched the other get into the through coach for King's Cross.

As the train ran past the depot at Ferriby, Willis observed that the Girondin was not discharging pit-props, but instead was loading casks of some kind. He had noted on the previous Friday, when he had been in the neighborhood, that some wagons of these casks had been shunted inside the enclosure, and were being unloaded by the syndicate's men. The casks looked like those in which the crude oil for the ship's Diesel engines arrived, and the fact that she was loading them unemptied-he presumed them unemptied seemed to indicate that the pumping plant on the wharf was out of order.

The 5.3 p.m. ran, with a stop at Goole, to Doncaster, where the through carriage was shunted on to one of the great expresses from the north.

More from force of habit than otherwise, Willis put his head out of the window at Goole to watch if anyone should leave Archer's carriage. But no one did.

At Doncaster Willis received something of a shock. As his train drew into the station another was just coming out, and he idly ran his eye along the line of coaches. A figure in the corner of a third-cla.s.s compartment attracted his attention. It seemed vaguely familiar, but it was already out of sight before the inspector realized that it was a likeness to Benson that had struck him. He had not seen the man's face and at once dismissed the matter from his mind with the careless thought that everyone has his double. A moment later they pulled up at the platform.