Either a certain percentage of the sugar had been removed from the hold and smuggled into the country before the ship reached New York, or there was a conspiracy of some kind which involved a number of the weighers on the docks.
"The first supposition," argued Carr, "is feasible but hardly within the bounds of probability. If the shortage had occurred in a shipment of gold or something else which combines high value with small volume, that's where I'd look for the leak. But when it comes to hundreds of thousands of pounds of sugar—that's something else. You can't carry that around in your pockets or even unload it without causing comment and employing so many assistants that the risk would be extremely great.
"No, the answer must lie right here on the docks—just as it did in the sampling cases."
So it was on the docks that he concentrated his efforts, working through the medium of a girl named Louise Wood, whom he planted as a file clerk and general assistant in the offices of the company which owned the Murbar and a number of other sugar ships.
This, of course, wasn't accomplished in a day, nor yet in a month. As a matter of fact, it was February when Carr was first assigned to the case and it was late in August when the Wood girl went to work. But, as Dick figured it, this single success was worth all the time and trouble spent in preparing for it.
It would be hard, therefore, to give any adequate measure of his disappointment when the girl informed him that everything in her office appeared to be straight and aboveboard.
"You know, Dick," reported Louise, after she had been at work for a couple of months, "I'm not the kind that can have the wool pulled over my eyes. If there was anything crooked going on, I'd spot it before they'd more than laid their first plans. But I've had the opportunity of going over the files and the records and it's all on the level."
"Then how are you to account for the discrepancies between the bills of lading and the final receipts?" queried Carr, almost stunned by the girl's assurance.
"That's what I don't know," she admitted. "It certainly looks queer, but of course it is possible that the men who ship the sugar deliberately falsify the records in order to get more money and that the company pays these statements as a sort of graft. That I can't say. It doesn't come under my department, as you know. Neither is it criminal. What I do know is that the people on the dock have nothing to do with faking the figures."
"Sure you haven't slipped up anywhere and given them a suspicion as to your real work?"