A strange container is found in a busy London shipping yard, and its contents point to murder. The cask from a consignment of French wine from the steamship Bullfinch from Paris is bigger than the rest, its sides reinforced to hold the extraordinary weight within. As the longshoremen are bringing it onto the London docks, the cask slips, cracks, and spills some of its treasure: a wealth of gold sovereigns ...

Freeman Wills Crofts (1 June 1879 – 11 April 1957) was an Anglo-Irish mystery author during the golden age of detective fiction.