o relight his pipe, continued:

"Another common method is to send out liquor secretly, without a permit
at all. This may be done at night, or the stuff may go through an
underground pipe, or be hidden in innocent looking articles such
as suitcases or petrol tins. The pipe is the best scheme from the
operator's point of view, and one may remain undiscovered for months,
but the difficulty usually is to lay it in the first instance.

"A third method can be used only in the case of rectifiers and it
illustrates one of the differences between rectifiers and distillers.
Every permit for the removal of liquor from a distillery must be issued
by the excise surveyor of the district, whereas rectifiers can issue
their own certificates. Therefore in the case of rectifiers there is
the possibility of the issuing of forged or fraudulent certificates. Of
course this is not so easy as it sounds. The certificates are supplied
in books of two hundred by the Excise authorities, and the blocks must
be kept available for the supervisor's scrutiny. Any certificates can be
obtained from the receivers of the spirit and compared with the blocks.
Forged permits are very risky things to work with, as all genuine ones
bear the government watermark, which is not easy to reproduce. In fact,
I may say about this whole question of liquor distribution generally,
that fraud has been made so difficult that the only hope of those
committing it is to avoid arousing suspicion. Once suspicion is aroused,
discovery follows almost as a matter of course."

"That's hopeful for us," Willis smiled.

"Yes," the other answered, "though I fancy this case will be
more difficult than most. There is another point to be taken into
consideration which I have not mentioned, and that is, how the
perpetrators of the frauds are going to get their money. In the last
resort it can only come in from the public over the counters of the
licensed premises which sell the smuggled spirits. But just as the
smuggled liquor cannot be put through the books of the house selling it,
so the money received for it cannot be entered either. This means that
someone in authority in each licensed house must be involved. It also
carries with it a SUGGESTION, though only a SUGGESTION, the houses in
question are tied houses. The director of a distillery company would
have more hold on the manager of their own tied houses than over an
outsider."

Again Willis nodded without replying, and Hunt w