The Pit-Prop Syndicate

by Freeman Wills Crofts

Beamish accepting, the inspector led the way to the first-class refreshment room and approached the counter opposite the barmaid whose acquaintance he had made the previous day.

“Two small whiskies, please,” he ordered, having asked his companion’s choice.

The girl placed the two small tumblers of yellow liquid before her customers and Willis added a little water to each.

“Well, here’s yours,” he said, and raising his glass to his lips, drained the contents at a draught. Captain Beamish did the same.

The inspector’s offer of a second drink having been declined, the two men left the refreshment room, still chatting about the murdered man. Ten minutes later Captain Beamish saw the inspector off in the London train. But he did not know that in the van of that train there was a parcel, labelled to “Inspector Willis, passenger to Doncaster by 4.0 p.m.,” which contained a small tumbler, smelling of whisky, and carefully packed up so as to prevent the sides from being rubbed.

The inspector was the next thing to excited when, some time later, he locked the door of his bedroom in the Stag’s Head Hotel at Doncaster and, carefully unpacking the tumbler, he took out his powdering apparatus and examined it for prints. With satisfaction he found his little ruse had succeeded. The glass bore clearly defined marks of a right thumb and two fingers.

Eagerly he compared the prints with those he had found on the taxi call-tube. And then he suffered disappointment keen and deep. The two sets were dissimilar.

So his theory had been wrong, and Captain Beamish was not the murderer after all! He realized now that he had been much more convinced of its truth than he had had any right to be, and his chagrin was correspondingly greater. He had indeed been so sure that Beamish was his man that he had failed sufficiently to consider other possibilities, and now he found himself without any alternative theory to fall back on.

But he remained none the less certain that Coburn’s death was due to his effort to break with the syndicate, and that it was to the syndicate that he must look for light on the matter. There were other members of it—he knew of two, Archer and Morton, and there might be more—one of whom might be the man he sought. It seemed to him that his next business must be to find those other members, ascertain if any of them were tall men, and if so, obtain a copy of their finger-prints.

But how was this to be done? Obviously from the shadowing of the members whom he knew, that was, Captain Beamish, Bulla, and Benson, the Ferriby manager. Of these, Beamish and Bulla were for the most part at sea; therefore, he thought, his efforts should be concentrated on Benson.