Give Us This Day by R.F. Delderfield Page A

departed, and one of these precepts was "Know your enemy."
      Thus, on returning to Tryst in the first days of July 1897, he took no immediate action but continued to probe, using his personal contacts, his treasury of social and industrial trivia, and his library of reference books to follow up his two definite leads, one heading for Barbara Lockerbie, the other concerned with the haulier, Linklater, currently using the Tooley Street exit of the yard to load goods stacked in one of his warehouses. Ten days elapsed before he was satisfied that he had learned all he was likely to learn concerning both.
      Barbara Lockerbie was a high-class whore, who had emerged from obscurity with no capital beyond undeniable physical attractions and ruthless self-interest, deploying both to capture a rich and presumably excessively tolerant husband, then lead the kind of life that a selective harlot of her kind found agreeable. That is to say, to spend around three thousand a year on clothes, to stay looking young, to go everywhere, see everything, and, more important, to be seen by everyone. She had reached Sir James and his fortune via one husband and many lovers. Even the Prince of Wales was rumoured to be numbered among her admirers, but that Adam discounted, reasoning that if half the charmers reputed to have shared a bed with Edward had enjoyed his patronage, Edward would have declined years ago, as enfeebled as a Sultan of Turkey reared in a harem.
      Her first husband was an architect and her abandonment of him had led to a soon-forgotten scandal, the poor devil having thrown himself under a train at Liverpool Station soon after her desertion. The woman, he decided, was lethal, and his appraisal of her steeled him to take swift intervention to head off possible disaster, even though he doubted whether the hardheaded George was the type of man who would ruin himself over a woman, no matter how much he was besotted by her. You could never tell, however, in situations of this kind. Avery, his former partner, had been cynical and world-weary at forty, and an experienced roue into the bargain, yet he had sacrificed everything he possessed, and ultimately laid himself open to a charge of double murder, in order to spend himself between the legs of a Spanish music-hall artiste. Adam even recalled his self-justification when they met for the last time, a few hours before he smuggled the idiot out of the country. He had asked, "Have you ever been sexually enslaved?" and when Adam said he had not, "It happens. It happens to the cockiest of us. Take care it doesn't happen to you, Adam… A man can turn a blind corner as I did when I first took Esmerelda to bed…"
      Avery was surely an object lesson for, like him, George's weakness had always been women. He wished he knew more of George's early life in those days when the boy had been opening oysters in the network and on the Continent. The character of Gisela was no real guide to his taste. A man seldom married the kind of woman who could bring him ecstasy, plus a brief escape from care and responsibility. Usually he looked about for something more maternal and mature.
      His investigations into Linklater's, the carriers, were more positive. They were a relatively small firm, dealing mostly in sub-contract work, but currently expanding. They had a fleet of about three hundred waggons and bases in a few of the big manufacturing cities in the north and Midlands. Starr, Linklater's partner and son-in-law, had a dubious reputation in the trade. There had been a lawsuit some years back, concerned with the loss of a valuable consignment of agricultural machinery, and Starr emerged from it technically innocent but with his reputation tarnished. The discrepancy between the comments of the weighbridge clerk and those of the coffee-stall proprietor continued to puzzle him, and he decided that it was here he must resume his investigations and that it must be done with delicacy.
      George was