Give Us This Day (11 page)

”
Where
did you say?
Where
is it?”

“Swann’s, sir, the carriers… Going well, they say…!”

Adam threw himself round and caught his cab in the act of turning, shouting, “Get over the bridge! Half a sovereign if you make it in ten minutes…!”, and dragging open the door he flung himself on to the leather cushions he had quitted a moment since.

Five

River Scene

T
he man earned his half-sovereign. Taking advantage of every chink in the traffic, and three times mounting the pavement with his nearside wheel, he brought Adam to the junction of the Borough High Street and Tooley Street in eight minutes. As the cab drew up, yet another fire-engine clattered up from the direction of Southwark so that Adam, scrambling from the hansom and hurrying breathlessly as far as Grubb’s glue factory, saw that the yard was ringed with fire-engines and arched over with hissing jets from their hoses.

The confusion about him was that of a city captured by storm. Great banks of yellow smoke gusted towards the river on the light breeze, more and more sightseers arrived every minute, some of them scuffling with the harassed police, and trapped vehicles from the Old Kent Road side tried to fight their way out of the press, striking one another glancing blows so that their drivers’ oaths and shouts of warning added to the general tumult. And beyond it all, like the continuous crackle of musketry, came the menacing sputter of the flames at the heart of the fire some hundred yards lower down the street.

He stood there a moment dazed by the uproar, telling himself that it was all a mistake on the part of that newsboy, that it was someone else’s empire that was burning and that his presence here was part of a nightmare. But beyond this the core of his brain kept reminding him that the fire was no coincidence, that the crooked trail he had been following ever since Sam Rawlinson had croaked out his warning led directly to this scene of destruction and the suspicion, close to a certainty, made him swear aloud as he chopped his way through the press of spectators, shouting, “I’m Swann! I own the damned place…! Let me pass!”

The police nearer the bridge gave way to him, but halfway down Tooley Street, at a point where he could see the pulse of yellow and crimson flame beyond the weighbridge gate, a sergeant caught him by the arm and said, “Don’t go in, sir… They’re driving the horses through! The stables have caught,” and he watched, appalled, as four Cleveland Bays dashed through the gate heading directly for the section of the crowd held at the junction of Tower Bridge Road. At the same time he saw a terrified Clydesdale caught by a triumphant urchin outside the scent factory and led away, to await receipt of its captor’s tip.

He said, to the sergeant at his elbow, “How bad is it? How much of the yard is involved?”

The policeman replied, “Bad enough! It’s only been going forty minutes and look at it. All this side is well alight, but they say the Southwark brigades are getting a grip on the other side.”

“How did it start? Does anyone know?” and the man glanced at him. “How do they ever start? Carelessness nine times out of ten, and Mr. Nobody’s the culprit! Stand
back
there!
Jarman! Hoskins!
Stop those fools crossing the road!” and he bustled away, fully absorbed in his job of controlling the ever-increasing swarm of spectators, now surging in from the bridge and all the side streets connecting Tooley Street with the Old Kent Road.

A moment later Adam saw his youngest son, Edward, wild-eyed and stripped to his shirt and shouted, “Edward! Over here, boy!” The youth spun round, knuckling his eyes and exclaiming, “Gov’nor! How did you get here? I thought…”

“I was in Gannon Street and heard of it. Were you here when it started?”

“Yes, in the clerical section… Somebody rushed in and said a warehouse was well alight…”

“Which warehouse?”

“Number Eight, that new one behind the tower. There was a frightful panic. Everyone rushed out and did what they could, but it was little enough until the brigades got here. We only had the hand-pump and buckets. Then the roof of the counting-house went up… must have been sparks.”

“Are either of your brothers around?”

“Hugo is. Over on the far side, turning the horses loose. The waggon-shed and forge are alight and two other warehouses, I believe. Everything was as dry as tinder, sir!”

Adam said, “Keep by me, I’m going in,” and taking advantage of the sergeant’s back, he slipped across the road and through the dense smoke shrouding the weighbridge.

It was a little clearer beyond, where the river breeze was driving the smoke to the west, and he was able to make some assessment of the overall scene. The heart of the fire was in the immediate area of Number Eight warehouse, the one they kept padlocked, but there seemed no hope of saving the counting-house, or the stable block and forge that ran at right angles to it. Three pinnaces, one-horse vans that served the suburbs on short-run hauls, had been dragged out of the waggon-shed and were burning in isolation in the centre of the yard. Maddened horses clattered past on either side, making by instinct for the main exit. A group of helmeted firemen were playing four jets on the counting-house, but even as they watched a superintendent detached them to concentrate on the stable block, leaving the onestorey building to burn itself out. Smoke from the gutted warehouse set them both coughing and wheezing, and all around the steady crackle of the flames proclaimed the certainty that Swann’s headquarters, as he had known it over half a lifetime, was doomed.

He said, grimly, “Where’s the yard manager? Where’s Wesley Tybalt, Edward?”

“I don’t know, sir. George is away, and Giles too… Shall I try and find Tybalt?”

“Yes… you do that. I’ll stay as close here as I can. They seem to be containing it about here.”

“Hadn’t you better get back to the street, sir?”

“Do as I say. Find Tybalt, and if you can’t bring Hugo.”

The boy dashed off, moving in a way that reminded Adam of Henrietta’s claim that, of all the Swanns, only Edward favoured her father Sam. It was true. He had Sam’s big head and squat, squarish frame, Sam’s bustle and air of guarded alertness. In a matter of seconds he was lost in the swirl of smoke from the stable block, but he re-emerged a few minutes later with Hugo in tow. It was the first time Adam had ever seen Hugo blown, despite his string of triumphs on the running track. He gasped, “It’s a regular shambles, Gov’nor. All happened so quickly. Never seen a fire get a hold like that. But we got the horses out. All seventy of ‘em.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“No, sir, I think not. But the superintendent says he can’t save Four and Five warehouses. He’s concentrating on the others, giving them a rare soaking. The waggons are our property but there are customers’ goods in all the sheds.”

“Water will spoil what the flames don’t get,” Adam grunted. “How about Tybalt? Is he over there?”

“I haven’t seen him,” Hugo said. “Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him all day.”

“I have,” Edward volunteered. “He came into the counting-house and went through to his office some time in the afternoon.”

“When was it? Think, boy, think hard!”

“It must have been about an hour or so before the alarm was given.”

“You didn’t see him go to the key rack?”

“No, sir, but he doesn’t have to. He has duplicates in his office over there.”

“Where, exactly?”

“In a rack on the wall behind his desk in the annexe,” and Edward pointed to the butt end of the clerical building, the one portion of the block that was still more or less intact. Even its window, facing the yard, was unbroken.

He said, “Come with me, Edward. Hugo, go back and tell the superintendent to make his major effort on the warehouses. You’re quite right. The waggons are fully insured but we’ve only minimum cover for goods in transit, once they’re stored in the yard!” As Hugo hurried off he led the way to the abutting end of the clerical section, Edward following with a bewildered expression on his pink, squarish face. There was a pinnace axle-tree resting against the brickwork and Adam lifted it, smashing the frame and the four panes of glass with a few swift blows. The heat here was intense, but under the wall they were protected from the dense clouds of smoke issuing from the burning half of the building. He turned to the boy. “Scramble in and look at that desk and key rack. Jump to it. Desk first…” and Edward dived through the aperture and was at once shrouded in smoke.

He called back, “All the drawers are open or thrown down. He must have saved his papers.”

“Are his keys there?”

“Yes, sir, I think so.”

“Bring ‘em out, boy. Sharp about it,” and Edward came tumbling out, his hands full of keys, each with its oval label.

“Shall I give them to the firemen?”

“No, I’ll take them. They’ll hack their way in if they have to, but it mightn’t be necessary. You say the desk was cleared?”

“More or less. There were papers on the floor.”

“Right, now listen here. I’m staying in town, at the Norfolk, and there’s nothing I can do here. Tell Hugo where I am, and tell him to notify the brigade chief and the senior police officer. I need a drink and a good wash while I’m at it. You and Hugo watch out for yourselves, and don’t take chances saving property. We can always replace property,” and he walked away, leaving the yard by the main entrance and pushing roughly through the ranks of sightseers now contained behind a rope barrier. He was more than halfway across the bridge before he saw an empty cab going his way. He said, clambering inside, “Norfolk Hotel,” and settled back in the interior, his mind juggling with so many factors that it finally abandoned any attempt to relate them. The stench of woodsmoke clung to his clothes, and he had inhaled so much of the stuff that he felt sick and muddleheaded. But then, as he stretched his legs, he heard the keys jangle and thought, sourly, That was a bonus, anyway. I don’t know as it will prove anything
, but it’s a lead having regard to Tybalt’s jumping the gun in order to empty that desk.

2

His over-riding desire, before he so much as ordered a drink, was to have a bath. The stench that hung about him was not merely unpleasant. It darkened his thoughts to a degree that the fire could not have achieved. The depression was at a different level, the deepest level of his consciousness. He probed its source, asking himself why a fire, even one so fierce and destructive, should make him feel lonely and desolate. Then it came to him in the whiff of his jacket as he peeled it off, a stink of frustrated wretchedness and personal degradation that took him back to a time years before Swann’s waggons roamed the highways, to places on the far side of the world. It was the once familiar reek of burning towns, the stench of Delhi, Cawnpore, Lucknow, and Jhansi, ravaged, looted, and fired. It struck him that the nose was the best barometer of the spirit, that certain smells one associated with hope and happiness, and others, like this one, with bitterness and defeat.

He muttered, “Here now, this won’t do! You’re responsible for it in a way, so keep your nerve and see what can be salvaged from the mess!” He spread the keys Edward had given him on the bed, examining each label carefully.

There were seventeen in all, eight giving access to warehouses, two to the main entrances of the yard, one to the head clerk’s office, one to the clerical building itself, one marked “postern” (he assumed this opened the new Tooley Street exit), and four belonging to other sectors of the yard, the tack room, the waggon-stores, and the forge. He set aside all but the warehouse keys and studied these again, marking off in his mind the buildings they represented, the row of one-storey warehouses facing his old tower that were used, in his day and since, for goods awaiting shipment and onward transmission into the Kentish Triangle and Southern Square.

At first the set seemed complete, but then it came to him that one was missing. The key to that smaller, newer warehouse across from the counting-house, with its exit at the rear, and the significance of this occurred to him at once. It told him that Wesley Tybalt, slipping into the office to empty his desk, had hooked this key from the rack and used it to further some purpose of his own.

Cautiously he pondered that purpose, forgetting his need for a wash and a drink but sitting there in his shirt-sleeves, his mind reviewing every factor in the case.

Wesley had not been seen about the place all day, save for that fleeting visit to his office. Wesley had been nowhere around when the fire started and gained its hold. The fire had begun in that quarter of the yard. Wesley had not returned the key, a golden rule at the yard all the time it had been Swann’s headquarters. It pointed, he would say, to two certainties. One, Wesley was the last to visit the small warehouse, and two, Wesley had been warned by someone that the hunt was up and he would be required, within the next twenty-four hours, to answer a number of awkward questions. Concerning himself and Robsart, seen in Linklater’s yard last night, and concerning, above all, the contents of that warehouse and the invoices representing the goods inside. Dramatically, a pattern emerged revealing so much that it had the power to make him leap up, putting so much reliance on his tin leg that he stumbled.

Great God, the fellow’s not only a thief but an arsonist, covering his tracks!
he thought, and almost choked with rage, calling himself an absolute fool not to have spotted the grand design days ago, or at least last night, after Tybalt senior told him about the Swann packages in the Linklater waggon.

His first impulse was to contact the police and put them in touch with their colleagues at the seat of the fire. His second, on the heels of the first, was more complicated. It involved not only Wesley Tybalt, but Tybalt senior and maybe a dozen subverted men at headquarters and out along the network. Detection on this scale called for skilful timing and absolute secrecy if the entire gang was to be rounded up and the network purged from top to bottom. And he was unequal to the demands of that task right now, when he was tired, hungry, and filthy.

He looked at his watch, surprised to find it was coming up to eight o’clock, four hours since he had stampeded over London Bridge to the burning yard. He shrugged off the rest of his clothes, put on his dressing gown and slippers, took his towel, soap, and razor, and went along the corridor to the bathroom, an innovation up here, for until recently guests had made do with tin bowls and cans of hot water carried up three flights of stairs. For half an hour or more he soaked and scraped, turning the finer points of his assumptions over and over in his mind, and then, feeling ready for battle, he sprinkled himself with lavender water and went back along the corridor to his room.