“Well, what do you think yourself? We suspect brandy smuggling, and here we find at the import end of the concern the nearest building in an isolated region is a distillery—a rectifying house, mind you! Isn’t that a matter of design too? How better could they dispose of their stuff than by dumping it on to rectifiers?”
“You distinguish between distillers and rectifiers?”
“Certainly; there’s less check on rectifiers. Am I not right in saying that while the regulations for the measurement of spirit actually produced from the stills are so thorough as to make fraud almost impossible, rectifiers, because they don’t themselves produce spirit, but merely refine what other firms have produced, are not so strictly looked after? Rectifiers would surely find smuggled stuff easier to dispose of than distillers.”
Hilliard shook his head.
“Perhaps so, theoretically,” he admitted, “but in practice there’s nothing in it. Neither could work a fraud like that, for both are watched far too closely by our people. I’m afraid I don’t see that this place being here helps us. Surely it’s reasonable to suppose that the same cause brought Messrs. Ackroyd & Bolt that attracted the syndicate? Just that it’s a good site. Where in the district could you get a better? Cheap ground and plenty of it, and steamer and rail connections.”
“It’s a coincidence anyway.”
“I don’t see it. In any case unless we can prove that the ship brings brandy the question doesn’t arise.”
Merriman shrugged his shoulders good-humoredly.
“That’s a blow,” he remarked. “And I was so sure I had got hold of something good! But it just leads us back to the question that somehow or other we must inspect that depot, and if we find nothing we must watch the Girondin unloading. If we can only get near enough it would be impossible for them to discharge anything in bulk without our seeing it.”
Hilliard murmured an agreement, and the two men strolled on in silence, the thoughts of each busy with the problem Merriman had set. Both were realizing that detective work was a very much more difficult business than they had imagined. Had not each had a strong motive for continuing the investigation, it is possible they might have grown fainthearted. But Hilliard had before him the vision of the kudos which would accrue to him if he could unmask a far-reaching conspiracy, while to Merriman the freeing of Madeleine Coburn from the toils in which she seemed to have been enmeshed had become of more importance than anything else in the world.