"I'm not fooling any longer. It might be very important, so you'll tell me why Wes Tybalt rang."
"It wasn't important."
"You let me be judge of that."
She had learned, over the years, precisely how much teasing a man could stand. There was no sense in antagonising him beyond a certain point or he might turn sulky and sulks in a lover meant a dull evening.
"All right, let me go. It was a fire at the yard."
"What kind of fire?"
"How should I know? He said a fire, and asked if I could get hold of you."
"And you left him on the end of the telephone?"
"The line is still open."
"But good God, I heard that bell tinkle when I started shaving fifteen minutes ago. You had no right…" and he would have made for the landing where the telephone was, but she felt challenged and grabbed him by the hand, throwing her full weight against his arm so that he staggered and fell on her.
"Let go, Babs! I've got to talk to Tybalt if he's still there."
"He's waited fifteen minutes. He'll wait another ten. At least long enough to prove I'm more important than a transport yard," and she tried to enfold him in a way that would have delayed some men even if the bed had been on fire.
She got a real shock then, of a kind that was unique in her experiences over the last few years, although it was by no means the first time she had been manhandled. He got his right hand under her chin and pushed with sufficient force to break her embrace and throw her against the bedhead where the impact made her teeth rattle. And then, before she could regain sufficient breath to swear, as only Barbara Lockerbie could swear given provocation, he was gone and she heard him snap, "Tybalt? Are you still there, Tybalt?" After that, while she was deciding whether she enjoyed or resented being rough-handled by a man again, she heard a sharp exclamation on his part followed by a long, mystifying silence.
2
The voice reached Adam like a hail from the top of a mountain. George's voice certainly, but distorted by distance and his own drowsiness so that it was small as a child's yet charged with a child's urgency.
"Is that you, Tybalt? Tybalt, can you hear me?" He dragged himself fully awake, stared down at the earpiece still held in his numbed hand, and said, "It's not Tybalt, George. Tybalt's skipped." And the gasp at the far end of the wire reached him as the ultimate in surprise and apprehension.
He was alert now and wondering how he could have slept so soundly without relinquishing his grasp on the heavy earpiece. There was a sour taste in his mouth, the straps of his tin leg had cut into the flesh of his thigh, and he could still smell that damned smoke.
"You, Gov'nor?"
"It's me, George. Come on home you young fool, and get about your business."
"What… what's happened? I heard there'd been a fire. How bad a fire?"
"As bad as a fire can be, short of loss of life. Two-thirds of H.Q. is in ruins, but that's the least of your troubles, lad."
It was rubbing in salt but he didn't care. If anyone had sat up and begged for punishment George had over the last few weeks.
"Two-thirds? What could be worse?"
"Your credit. And the life of someone who gave everything he had to the network."
"But you said no one was hurt…"
"Not in the fire. I'll give it you short and sweet, George. Young Tybalt's made a monstrous fool of you. He robbed the firm right and left and his father caught him at it."
"Old man Tybalt?"
"Yes, old man Tybalt. He was one year junior to me. What the devil has his age to do with it? He was so damned ashamed that he hanged himself before I could get to him and I hold you responsible for that. Can you still hear me?"
"I can hear you."
"Then I'll add something to that. Do you know what Tybalt used to anchor the cravat that strangled him? One of Lockerbie's flush cisterns. Go in and tell that woman as much. I daresay it will make her laugh. Then come home and don't waste time doing it, d'you hear?"
He replaced the earpiece on its hook and put his hand to his aching thigh, massaging it with the slow circular motion he had employed ever since he wore an artificial limb. The night manager looked in.
"Were you able to get your subscriber, sir?"
"I got him and I'm obliged to you. Put the cost of the call on my bill and make it up for the morning. I shall be leaving after breakfast."
"Certainly, sir. Good night, sir."
"Good night."
He climbed the stairs feeling older than Pharaoh and as oppressed as Atlas. There was no satisfaction in bludgeoning George in that ruthless way, but it had to be done. Only a shock of that nature would bring the boy to his senses, and even that might fail when he surveyed the ruin of the yard. He might see it as something hardly worth redeeming.
* * *
She was still sitting on the bed. Naked now, her back to the bedrest and slowly combing her blue-black hair as though, by unmasking all her batteries, she could be certain of capitulation on the spot. He was stubborn but not as stubborn as all that, or not unless the sum total of all she had learned about men was less than she had assumed all these years. She said, gaily, "Well, George? Did the little man tell you to report back for duty?"
"The little man wasn't the yard manager. The little man was a very big one."
"Oh? Who would that be, George?"
"My father."
She was not so much alerted by that as by his changed expression. It was drained yet glowering, as though news of the fire had reduced him to total insignificance.
"But he's retired, isn't he? How does he come to be mixed up in it?"
"No time to explain," he said, thrusting his legs into his trousers and hitching his belt so tightly that it emphasised his small waist and the impressive breadth of his shoulders.
"Listen, George," she said, earnestly, "I'm sorry I kept it from you, but I really couldn't imagine you would be concerned to that extent. After all, what do you pay men for if it isn't to run the place when you're away?"
"Wesley Tybalt did that all right," he growled. "He's been practising large-scale fraud and coinciding every fresh haul with my absences. If I ever run across him he won't live to betray anyone else who trusted him!"
"How much has he stolen from you?"
He glared down at her. Her promise seemed to arouse in him no more interest than if he had been looking at a bale of merchandise.
"What the hell does it matter? I get a message that my place is in ruins, that my manager has skipped with everything he could get his claws on, that Tybalt's father, one of my Gov'nor's oldest colleagues, has hanged himself for shame of it. What the devil do you expect me to do? Call it a day and snuggle into bed?"
"Hanged himself? You mean the manager's father was involved?"
He paused, at least long enough to give her a pitying glance. "How could you understand? Some people have scruples. You might be amazed to learn it but they do. Wes Tybalt's father worked for Swann-on-Wheels from the day it sent its first waggon out on the roads. It was his life, and he lived to see it in ruins at the hands of his son and successor. It's no use asking how you might feel in those circumstances. You probably wouldn't feel a damned thing, not being put together that way. But I feel something. I feel it wouldn't take much to put me in the frame of mind of old man Tybalt!"
He was scrambling into his clothes all the time he was talking. She said, with a shrug, "Well, you still have to be practical. There's no transport out of here until morning. All the servants are in bed, the stables are locked, and there isn't a train to town until six in the morning."
He paid no further attention to her so she climbed off the bed and put her arms around him. "George, dear, think! I can arrange for you to be driven to the station in time to catch the first train. I daresay it's a shock, and naturally you'll feel yourself needed. But for heaven's sake…"
He freed himself from her with an air of resignation.
"I'll walk to the main road and hope to hop a nigh
t haul into Covent Garden. Market gardeners pass through the village from time to time." He gave her a final, searching look. "This is goodbye, Babs. I'm wide awake now and you aren't likely to catch me napping again. Good hunting."
The flatness and finality of the parting stunned her, striking a shattering blow at her vanity so that, for the moment at least, she felt as vulnerable as the fifteen-yearold waif who had staked her future on Captain Schmitt in the St. Lawrence River all those years ago. She said, wonderingly, "Don't I count for anything any more?"
"Not a thing, my dear, but it's not your fault. Like I say, it's the way people are put together and you're patchwork mostly."
She had no answer to this, and stood there, hands on hips, watching him go. The front door slammed and she listened to the scrape of his feet on the wooden steps leading to the lawn. He was a man entirely outside her experience, and her sense of humiliation, although overwhelming, was tinged with curiosity. She went over to the window and pulled aside the curtain. In the light of the waning moon she saw his shadow cross a gravel path and melt into the coppice that shut off the view of the big house. She realised then that she would never see him again, and the certainty of this generated in her a yearning that was more urgent than anything in her past. She would have given all she possessed to have been able to will him to turn about, re-enter the room, throw her on the bed, and share his strength with her for a few riotous moments, letting her absorb a little of the ethos of the first real man she had ever held in her arms. Frustration welled in her to a point where she could have screamed and hurled things about the room, but she lacked even the spirit to do this. Instead she sat astride her dressing-stool, staring into the gilded mirror and seeing there a parody of the woman who had purred back at her reflection an hour ago.
3
Adam stood in the narrow casement of the tower looking across an acre of desolation at the familiar curve of the river, finding a crumb of satisfaction in the knowledge that the stone-built belfry had survived while all about it were heaps of ashes and charred timber, broken here and there by the rotten tooth of a chimneystack where the stoves of the various buildings had been centred. Here, on this side of the yard, his tower was all that remained. The Tooley Street warehouse, the counting-house, the waggon-shed, the forge, and even the high clapboard fence had been consumed, together, he assumed, with a hundredweight of documents, ledgers, invoices, and records of goods in transit to the docks and goods awaiting transit in the network. How did one set about sorting out a mess on this scale? Old Tybalt could have attempted it but Tybalt was lying under a sheet in the Rotherhithe mortuary.
At right angles to the main gate the stable block was all but destroyed and two of the original warehouses, timber-built, were roofless and windowless. Of the rest, on the far side, where the Southwark brigades had been first on the scene, warehouses had been saved but it was likely half the goods inside had been spoiled by jets played on the roofs and through the windows. Tiny eddies of smoke still rose from a jumble of waggons at the centre assembly point and word had come that a total of forty-seven vehicles had been destroyed or damaged. All the horses had been saved, thank God, but to use them someone would have to borrow transport from Southern Square, The Bonus, and the Kent Triangle, dislocating all the schedules in those regions for as long as Blunderstone the coachbuilder took to replace what was lost.
He heard footsteps on the stairway and turned back into the room as George came in. His face, clothes, and hands were smudged and blackened. He looked like a man who had himself narrowly escaped death in a blazing building. He said, "They told me you were here at first light, George. Is that so?"
"I was lucky. I got a lift as far as Barnet in a market gardener's van, then caught a train around four."
"Have you had any breakfast?"
"I've no appetite for breakfast, Gov'nor."
"You'd best have some, none the less. Send one of the men over to the coffee stall. You've had a good look round?"
"I've seen all there is to see." He glanced round the octagonal room, littered with debris that might just as well have been burned. "I'm glad this place is intact. It means a lot to you, doesn't it?"
"Aye, it does." He lowered himself on a crate, spread his legs, and rested his hands on his knees. Pity for the boy was beginning to invade him. He had never seen George look or move in this listless way. "It's not the end of the world, lad. You'll make it all good, I daresay, providing you pull yourself together and go back to that nice gel of yours. There's not much you can do here until the assessors have had a look. Why don't you go home to her. She'll be right glad to see you."
George said, "I can't get two things out of my head. How I could have been so wrong about Wes Tybalt, and why his father had to take it so hard."
"As to the first," Adam said, "young Tybalt fooled us all, me included. I never liked the chap. He was too smarmy for my book. But it always seemed to me he knew his business."
"He knew his business all right," George said, savagely. "It's hard to estimate, but my guess is he's taken us for thousands, apart from the fire. I screwed that much out of Robsart before the police took him away. I got a list of his confederates, too. These fellows have no more loyalty to each other than they have for us."
"How many are involved?"
"Eight. Three in Northern Region, three in the Midlands, and two in the south. Robsart told all he knows and I think he's telling the truth. Probably too scared to do less. I've sent wires to lay the others by the heels, but they're small fry. Tybalt was the brains behind it. Robsart says he even organised Linklater's side of it, and where the devil are we to start looking for him?"
"Overseas, I'd say. Providing you want to."
"Don't you?"
"No," said Adam, "I don't think I do. He'd be hard to find, anyway. He probably had it planned and is heading for some country without an extradition treaty. He might be snug on any one of a thousand vessels by now. My guess is he crossed to France last night and will keep moving from there. Take my advice. Don't spend yourself chasing Wesley. You've got more than enough to keep you occupied."
"That isn't the reason, is it? I mean, not the reason you don't want Wesley brought back and charged."
"No. The real reason is the loyalty I owe his father. Used to bully him unmercifully in the old days, when he came up here fussing about one thing and another. But Swann-on-Wheels owes him more than it owes any single man and if I could have reached him in time I'm sure I could have talked him round. However, there it is. Any fool can chart a course when he's home and dry. It never occurred to me he'd go to his son and give him a headstart in that way."
"Do you really think he started the fire, Gov'nor?"
"He started the warehouse fire. Probably didn't intend to do more than destroy what was in there, so that we should have trouble proving anything. Unsupported evidence of men like Robsart wouldn't have convicted him."
"Then why didn't he stay and brazen it out?"
"He slipped up admitting as much as he did to his father. Or maybe the size of the blaze scared him, or someone saw him entering or coming out of the place. Who can tell? Forget Wesley and take a look at your own affairs, George. Care to tell me how it started? I'm not poking about in a midden heap. It might help to talk to someone other than your wife."
"Gisela won't even refer to it. Most English women would, but a Continental goes to the heart of the matter."
"Isn't that woman Lockerbie the heart of the matter?"
"No, Gov'nor, not really. There was nothing permanent about that relationship. What happened here in the meantime is what counts."
"You're saying you were never in love with that woman?"
"I've never really understood that phrase… 'in love'. Have you?"
"Not in the way poets peddle it. Love? I suppose I've always seen it as a crop raised by an association between a man and a woman after they've been trapped by their senses. Your mother and I were like that. I didn't 'love' her in that sense when we marri
ed. And she was far too green and too flighty to know what she was about, apart from choosing a wedding gown and having some kind of status conferred upon her. But she fancied me and I fancied her, and we grew important to one another, the way people do when they find 'emselves saddled with shared responsibilities." He beetled his brows and stared at the floor. "If you had to cut loose for a spell, why didn't you go to the places men frequent when things get on top of them?"
"It wasn't that kind of need."
"What kind was it?"
George said, slowly, "I was twenty when I met Gisela. I'll tell you something I never told anyone else. You've met her tribe of sisters. They were all as pretty as pictures, and very saucy with it in those days. I might have settled on either one of them, or all three of them maybe, if it hadn't been for old Grandfather Maximilien and his engine. He steered Gisela my way. Quite deliberately. You probably never did believe our eldest boy was a seven-month child."
Give Us This Day Page 12