Free Give Us This Day by R.F. Delderfield

sake and Travis, the proprietor, greeted him with enthusiasm. “My stars, it’s time enough since you looked in, Mr. Swann, sir! Alwus reckoned you was my most reg’lar earlybird in the old days.”
    “I’ve taken to lying in at my time o’ life, Travis,” he said, recalling how often he used to stand there sniffing the early morning tideway reek after an all-night session in his tower. And then, seeing the barred entrance to the yard a few strides up the street, a freak line of enquiry occurred to him and he added, “Did that new exit improve your trade, Travis? I would have thought carters coming and going there would have been your regulars, seeing there are two coffee stalls nearer the main gate.”
    “I thought it would but it didn’t,” Travis said. “They don’t use it during the day, tho’ vans call in for stuff night-times now and again.”
    “Light traffic?”
    “All kinds but not your waggons. Stuff you’ve hauled into town for local carriers. I see one o’ Gibson’s beer drays waiting there one evening last week. And on’y last night a Linklater two-horse took a load aboard. Short run hauls, they’d be, and short-haulers were never much good to me, sir. My best reg’lars were the chaps who had been hauling long-distance and were dam’ sharpset by the time they got here. I do see Mr. Hugo from time to time. You must be right proud of him, sir.”
    He forced his mind away from the disturbing knowledge that one of Linklater’s vehicles had been here within the last few hours, despite the weighbridge clerk’s assurance that their sub-contract work had fallen off since they opened their own yard at Rotherhithe nearer the docks, and contemplated the new Englishman’s obsessive interest in sport. A man like Travis, he supposed, would see Hugo as the superior product of a commercial family. In his own youth, railway kings and engineers had been the popular idols. Now reverence was reserved for muscular oafs who could break track records, kick footballs from one end of the field to the other, and hit cricket balls for six. He said, “Ah, Hugo, he’s the best free advertisement Swann-on-Wheels ever had, or so my other sons tell me,” and finishing his coffee moved off towards the station, his mind still occupied assembling the fragments of information his visit had accumulated.
    They were beginning to multiply. George’s unexplained absence; Wesley Tybalt’s defensive manner; a new gate that wasn’t used during the day, although it opened directly on that padlocked warehouse; the weighbridge clerk’s ignorance that Swann was still subcontracting for the firm of Linklater, the original source of Sam’s information that “young Tybalt wanted watching.”
    It made no sense, any of it, and he supposed in the end he would have to come right out with his suspicions, if his vague uneasiness justified the word, and ask George whether, in his view, there was anything worth investigating. But then another thought occurred to him and he wondered whether, in the circumstances, George was the right one to approach. George might be reticent about his own frequent excursions into the provinces, and almost surely resentful if neglect of duty was implied. What was needed was more detailed information concerning George’s alleged “gadding about,” and how much reliance he placed, in his absence, in Wesley Tybalt. The obvious source concerning the first was Gisela, George’s wife. As regards Wesley, Tybalt senior would be worth a visit, especially as, according to his son, he called in at the yard from time to time.
    He caught his train and settled grumpily into a corner, watching the evening light play tricks with the smoky labyrinth down there under the ugly complex of bridges and viaducts and telling himself that he was an ass, at his time of life, to bother himself with what was amiss, if anything, with the network. He had pledged himself long ago to leave all the worrying to his successors, and so