The Knives (13 page)

‘This is not the way to do anything, brother,’ Sadaqat responded.

‘Traitors and collaborators! Allah has no time for them, their shame will be
immense
.’ Jabirman resumed his harangue of Blaylock. ‘Why do you come to a Muslim area, how do you
dare
, when you persecute Muslims? Muslins you call “extreme”? What is
extreme? When you spy on Muslims, arrest them, deny their rights, when your government goes abroad and murders Muslims in Muslim lands?’

Andy Grieve pressed forward. ‘Sir, you need to get back—’

‘Be quiet with your mouth, fool, get your hands off me. Where is democracy and freedom you talk about, you would deny it me?’

It was Blaylock’s turn to speak over a shoulder, Andy’s. ‘I’m not denying you anything, Desmond, it would be nice if you’d let me pass.’

A shoe flew over Andy’s head and skimmed Blaylock’s shoulder. But now sufficient bodies were pressing the throng back. As Blaylock moved to the Jaguar he could hear Seema receiving her own dedicated broadside behind him – ‘Go suck the Home Office,
qahba
!’

Once Martin had them safely onto the A13 signposted for central London they sat in gloom and relative calm.

‘That went well, I think,’ Blaylock offered.

He insisted Martin drop Seema at her door in Bethnal Green, and since they were parked up he changed into his tuxedo in the backseat, Andy assisting him with his bow tie. Martin, meanwhile, took a call warning him of some disturbance on Pall Mall, where a student demonstration of sorts had been dispersed. But by the time the Jaguar pulled up before the Carlton Club there was nothing to see but for a trampled banner on the pavement, and a girl with a painted face remonstrating with a police officer. By now, just a shade before 9 p.m., Blaylock was light-headed with fatigue.

As applause from the gathering attended the end of a suitably Churchillian passage in Patrick Vaughan’s speech Blaylock endeavoured to slither unseen through the Churchill Room and seek his seat with minimum fuss. A brisket of beef with savoy cabbage materialised before him, via a deft young waiter. Casting an eye across the two dozen tables, however, he knew he was the
last Cabinet member to have presented himself, and that he had not evaded the Captain’s eye.

Vaughan, nonetheless, rolled on, relaxed and fluent in the absence of journalists, at ease before the fundraisers and donors who were his meat and drink, and who appeared to want much the same things as he wanted for Britain – less red tape in Whitehall, fewer wind turbines in the countryside, and a proper respect for the blessed energy of private enterprise throughout the land.

If the public could see us up close and unbuttoned like this
, Blaylock wondered,
would they think better of us? Or worse?
Given the rich fare on offer, dog-tired as he was, Blaylock filled his wine glass and drank. It was an elite experience, for sure, and the disparity with the place whence he had come could not have been more glaring to him; yet in the face of such glares he had learned to be phlegmatic.

Upon the serving of coffee and cognac Blaylock got to his feet and exchanged glad hands and polite remarks with bankers and hedge funders, grocers and MDs of car firms, a witty milliner and a restaurateur with a svelte Bosnian Muslim wife. He had only just been introduced to ‘Duncan Scarth, from your part of the world, Home Secretary’ and felt his hand grasped by a tougher-looking customer than the crowd usually contained, when Al Ramsay stalked over and beckoned him aside, clutching a printed schedule for the next day’s showpiece immigration raid.

‘It’ll be good for you and Paddy to spend more time, David. I know he’d be pleased if you’d show up once in a while for the 4 p.m. daily meeting. The whole team would like to see you there more.’

‘Come on – that’s a polls and media meeting, Al, I’ve got sod all to contribute.’

‘With respect, David, why is that?’

Left alone again, Blaylock accepted a brandy, glanced around the room and gradually grew conscious that his eye was falling on young women: a leggy but stationary waitress idly tossing her
ponytail, a blonde in a fitted blue dress unabashedly retouching her lipstick, a pale-skinned belle engaging in conversation with her copper-haired head tilted lazily aside as if awaiting a portrait painter.

He shook his head in self-wonderment. How long, after all, had this been going on? How many months had he spent in abstinent
get-behind-me
mode, self-drilled to resist the slightest carnal urge, doggedly faithful to something he couldn’t quite stand to admit?

‘Decent show on the pulchritude front, eh?’

Chas Finlayson was at his side, more bloodhound-like even than usual and seeming to have put away a couple of Courvoisiers himself. He thrust a letter upon Blaylock. It was from the office of Martin Pallister, subject: ‘NATIONAL SERVICE’.

‘
I applaud your sensible and progressive proposition
,’ Blaylock read. ‘
I see the good it may do for disadvantaged young people, and you have my support. I hope the seeming opposition of the Prime Minister, Chancellor and Education Secretary will not be allowed to prevail
.’

‘That’s the thing fucked, isn’t it?’ said Finlayson sadly.

‘If the only way it can be won is with Labour support then – yeah, the Captain won’t be having that. Politics, eh?’

‘You and I know what it was for, David – for the young people with nothing going for them, no hope of a half-decent job – get them out of their deadbeat homes, give them a chance to use the body and mind they were given.’

‘I know, Chas, I’d have happily seen my own boy do it.’

‘Right. The point being that it be led by the armed forces. But, somehow, once my department got their fucking mitts on it, it became all about …
charity
work. Like some gap year. They said, “It has to lose the army angle, it puts young people off.” And the thing of it is, David, the whole fucking
reason
I wanted to do it was the fucking “army angle” …’

Finlayson’s tipsy, choleric gloom was hilarious to Blaylock. ‘I know, bonny lad,’ he offered consolingly. ‘I know.’

‘Just that bloody thing of making the best of yourself. That’s why you and I joined the forces, right?’

With a few good belts of brandy on-board Blaylock felt his tongue loosen. ‘Aw, for me, Chas? Truth is – it was all because of a woman. I could as well have joined the Foreign Legion.’

For a moment Finlayson looked as if he might cough up his dinner. Then he chortled and slapped Blaylock’s shoulder.

Back home, gloomy in the grasp of his armchair, Blaylock threw back three fingers of malt then repaired to his desk, where awaited a set of briefings for the next day that he had been resisting. Following whatever the morning brought in Slough a group of campaigning women were coming to see him at Shovell Street to discuss the issue of domestic violence. Blaylock had ensured that Phyllida Cox and Deborah Kerner were booked to be at his side for moral support.

The offence, he was in no doubt, was a wholly ugly and lamentable thing. He fully recognised that one might not know the half of a person with whom one had decided to partner and co-habit. He wished to give a fair hearing to the women’s concerns. On some level, though, he was troubled.

It troubled him as to what more he could usefully offer beyond the existing laws, checks of police records, injunctions, et cetera.

He was troubled, too, by a sense of the domestic sphere as a murk of inevitable disputations and conflicted emotions, a hard place for the state to invigilate relationships between two people in their full gamut of complexities, privacies, intimacies. It seemed to him that two people might so easily drift into a malaise and not realise it fully until far too late – whereupon one might then be too ashamed or frightened to do anything about it, perhaps feeling all the while that she would be sealing her partner’s fate,
handing him over to the law, while still feeling love for him. These elements, in his view, made intervention so hard to judge.

Undoubtedly, too, he was troubled by the undeniable historical fact of an occasion when police officers had been summoned by concerned neighbours to his and Jennie’s marital home, to attend the scene of a domestic disagreement that had escalated rapidly in both volume and passion and had seen Blaylock put his fist through a panel of their bedroom door that Jennie had locked from the other side.

There were mistakes, he knew, that outlived and stayed impervious to apology or remorse, and lived on behind the blackness of your eyes. You re-watched and re-watched yourself making them, just as you had watched yourself in the original sinful act, and yet failed to lay a staying hand on that second self.

Realising that he had done nothing but hold his head in his hands for some long moments Blaylock closed the folder and shut off the lights.

In the back of the parked Prime Ministerial Jag Patrick Vaughan was crisply turned out and rehearsing his lines, albeit frowning somewhat at the pages of the script on his lap.

‘“Be very clear, there is no hiding place if you’re here illegally.” I should swap the clauses, shouldn’t I? I will … “You will be found and you will be sent back where you came from.” Could I get away with “from whence you came”? Or does that sound fusty? Grammatically it’s just “whence”, isn’t it? David?’

‘Just sounds old-fashioned, Patrick. Stick with what you’ve got.’

‘Okay. Yes. “Much the better for you that you leave by your own accord.” Right …’

Blaylock peered out at the drear aspect of residential working-class Slough an hour since a grimy sunrise. The houses were good-sized, all stone-cladded or pebble-dashed, fronted by scruffy lawns. The Jaguar was parked next to a shuttered kebab shop, round a corner from the street where the action was scheduled to unfold. Theirs was a small cortege, dominated by two big chequered and crested vans around which the Immigration Enforcement team now milled – six officers, bulky in their navy flak blousons and boots, seeming to find the morning unexpectedly warm and visibly anxious for kick-off.

Al Ramsay, in a huddle with a handful of press, strode over and tapped the glass. Blaylock swung the door open.

‘Okay, I think we’ll roll in ten minutes.’

‘Why the delay? If we’re not careful the targets will have had their porridge and got off.’

‘The ITN van is still five minutes away. If you’re after something
to read, David …’ Ramsay handed him the
Guardian
, folded and plumped at the op-ed page, which asked in eighteen-point type: ‘What did Blaylock think he was doing in Stapletree?’

‘Getting out of listening to another bloody speech by me, I believe,’ offered Vaughan, suavely.

Blaylock tossed the paper aside. ‘It was a scheduled visit, with proper advance security, which got hijacked because somebody grassed.’ He drummed on his thighs, riled. ‘Sorry, Paddy, I just fancy a quick look out.’

As Blaylock moved from the car Andy Grieve broke from chatting with the Enforcement officers and moved to his side. One of the officers followed, frowning. ‘Sir, I think the guys are thinking we ought to move in before the whole postcode’s got wind of us?’

‘I think they’re right. Howay, let’s get cracking.’

After the briefest of conferences the Enforcement team headed round the street corner en route to the first address on the job-sheet, ignoring the vexed gesticulations of Al Ramsay. Blaylock looked to Andy, shrugged, and followed the officers.

Soon they had fanned out across the front of a property and were rapping lightly on doors and windows. Watching from the pavement with Andy, Blaylock saw a female officer emerge from inspection of a narrow side alley running the length of a breeze-block wall. He glanced up to a second-storey window, the glass blocked out by what he recognised as the Moroccan flag, a green pentagram amid a wash of red.

Suddenly the front door creaked open in its metal frame. One officer stepped inside, and his colleagues followed him. Blaylock heard Andy emit a long sceptical exhalation.

‘Six lads, why are they all going in the front …?’

Instantaneously two close-cropped men – wearing hardly more than sports vests – came hurtling down the alleyway. The first, seeing Blaylock and Andy, feinted to his right and raced out into the street, Andy taking to his heels in pursuit. The second hesitated
before Blaylock in the manner of a cornered mouse, then ducked his head and rammed at Blaylock like a bull. Blaylock tried and failed to get a hold of the man before crashing down to the cracked concrete.

He heard crunching boots and grunts all around and was quickly helped to his feet, whereupon he saw that Andy had the first runner already in custody, the second was being hotly pursued by blue-jackets, and a photographer was maniacally snapping away and reframing while Al Ramsay sought to dissuade him.

After ten fraught minutes – during which the big vans pulled round, the two runners were cuffed into the back of a police car, and Al Ramsay seemed not to want to acknowledge his existence – Blaylock accompanied the Prime Minister on a guided tour of the property.

The instant they were through the door into the narrow darkened hallway Blaylock could hear a child’s panic-stricken crying coming from the kitchen. The atmosphere felt wrong: Blaylock felt himself to be the invasive presence.

One interrogation was being conducted in the living room – Blaylock made out decent soft furnishings and a big telly, and heard ‘Who’s renting this place?’ repeated insistently. They were led on upstairs, met by a wall of sour unaired odour, where all the curtains were drawn and blankets and pillows were piled up across every floor, a ringtone diddled away unanswered and in the master bedroom four swarthy men in pyjamas sat, glumly constricted, on a bed, an officer standing over them, seeking to determine their names and ages.

‘Come on now, gents, you’re gonna get me cross.’

Their officer guide spoke quietly. ‘So, we have an Indian gentleman whose passport is a fake. A lady with a visa that expired several months ago. And it doesn’t appear these young Albanian men have any paperwork at all.’

‘So they’re all here illegally,’ said Vaughan, as if helpfully. ‘What next?’

‘Straight to detention, pending removal, no passing go.’

‘Well, I call that a fair morning’s work. You’d wonder why can’t it be like this all the time?’

Because this is showbusiness
, thought Blaylock, but then the Captain touched his arm and jerked a thumb in the direction of the stairs.

Back outside Al Ramsay took Vaughan into his care and stared critically at Blaylock. ‘I’m not sure you can face the cameras, David.’

‘Look, I okayed this operation, so I’m prepared to defend it.’

‘What I mean is, there’s a rip in your bloody jacket.’

Blaylock touched his shoulder and realised that Ramsay didn’t lie. ‘Whatever. I’ll do it in shirt-sleeves.’

Ramsay laid a hand on his arm and Blaylock was irritably minded to bat it aside. In fact he was being steered aside, for two officers were emerging from the house, flanking a crushed-looking woman with a sobbing four-year-old boy clutched awkwardly around her.

A fair morning’s work, oh yes
, Blaylock thought.

Once the stage was clear Ramsay approved the shot and Blaylock stood begrudgingly, arms folded, at the Captain’s side.

‘We came to Slough today to send a message. Be very clear, if you’re in this country illegally, there is no hiding place …’

On the M4 the corteges separated and Blaylock saw the Captain’s Jaguar power ahead, flanked by motorcycle outriders. He took a call from Mark Tallis, guessing correctly its import.

‘
You’ve gone viral again,
patrón.
Your security guy, though, he should know people are starting to ask who he is
.’

Blaylock chuckled as he hung up. Andy looked questioningly.

‘You’re getting famous, Andy …’

The phone pulsed again. Blaylock put it to his ear without thinking, only to recoil from a blast of discordant noise, out of which resolved a terribly familiar quasi-female automated monotone.

‘
Mr Blaylock, when will you die? When will you die, Mr Blaylock? Every second you’re alive, other people pay. Time for you to die, Mr Blaylock
.’

Andy clocked Blaylock’s grim expression and leaned in. Blaylock shared the handset with him, seeing that the screen read ID – UNKNOWN. The voice had mutated into a sinister childish treble. ‘
We see you, going around, stomping on the weak and the sick, calling it courage. Still so proud of yourself? Have a care, Mister Rat!
’

Grimacing, Andy made a cutting gesture with the flat of his hand.

‘The trap is set. Your time—’

Blaylock pressed END CALL and pondered the muted device for some moments.

‘Well, that’s that, for what it’s worth,’ Andy muttered. ‘He’s toast, whoever he is.’

Blaylock slumped back into the leather.

Badly wanting a place where he could close a door, change out of his torn jacket and hang a sign for an hour, Blaylock went to his ministerial office in the Commons. In a few hours he would head up to his constituency for the weekend, and a review of the itinerary in store for him offered such drabness as to dull the ragged edges of the morning’s run-arounds.

Last night’s
Tees Gazette
had been sent down for his attention and with a black coffee in hand he flicked through the paper to see which local stories had traction. A ‘Hands Off Our Hospital’ campaign, protesting the mooted sale of an A&E department’s land to a commercial developer, was ticking along predictably well. Blaylock’s Labour opponent, meanwhile, had pride of place on the
letters page, accusing him of ‘gambling with police numbers and public safety’. Labour, he had to admit, ran a good machine, its sights perennially trained on his exposed flanks. They believed Teesside South belonged rightly to them – that Blaylock merely had the seat on loan, and that the electorate would finally succumb to buyer’s remorse.

And yet he had won with a solid swing after an effort of which he remained proud – eighteen months of touring every ward with a clipboard, trudging up and down the stairwells of every social housing estate, listening to whatever concerns were proffered, promising to investigate them all. Where previously doors had always been hastily closed on Tory faces, people seemed to give a hearing to a local man, ex-army, who had worked for a living once. ‘Blaylock: A Different Kind of Tory’ was the helpful headline on an early
Gazette
profile.

Once installed, though, Blaylock had been made to look a pinch-penny after years of public subsidy that had improved Teesside South both materially and cosmetically. It remained a seat where the council and the NHS were the biggest employers, with equal numbers of people out of work long term. Now the place clearly could benefit from fresh funds, a few coats of paint, more troops to pluck the weeds and spear the litter. But Caroline Tennant had decreed there was no money this year, nor the next; whereas some floating voters clearly believed Labour might cough up. ‘Blaylock: Same Old Tory’ had been a recent and rather hurtful
Gazette
letters banner.

He put his constituency papers into one neat set and asked his PA to get the chief executive of NHS Teesside on the line.

Striding from the lift at Shovell Street Blaylock saw the short, compact figure of Paul Payne lurking by his door, unsmiling as ever, his backcombed blonde hair a significant addition to his height. Blaylock found Payne a baffling mix of insecurity and
cockiness – subdued for long spells before popping up to create some trouble he had carefully crafted at his desk. Though Blaylock thought Payne pretty lucky to hold a junior ministerial brief, the man himself clearly thirsted for further recognition, despite his seeming lack of friends and the void where a personality ought to be. Yet Payne was nothing if not determined; and here he was, popping up again.

‘David, about that jaunt of yours to Stapletree last night?’

‘Yes?’

‘I wish you would have told me about it.’

Blaylock shrugged. ‘It got fixed up at short notice, Paul. And you’ll have seen, it was nearly a debacle – I’d say you were lucky to miss out.’

‘But didn’t you think going there was worth discussing first here?’

‘You mean discussing with you? What would you have said?’

‘From a Security view I’d have said it was maybe a rash choice – not going to somewhere more considered, better vetted.’

‘Good job we didn’t speak, then. I might have missed meeting someone who was worth meeting. Since we’re doing gripes, Paul, if you’ve some issue you want to share related to the Identity Documents Bill, start by sharing it with me, not with the PM in front of visiting dignitaries. You got that?’

Payne nodded diffidently, clearly unapologetic. Blaylock, immeasurably irked by a self-styled rival he didn’t remotely rate, pressed on by.

‘Home Secretary, we face a crisis in this country – a crisis of violence against women in the home. It accounts for one in five violent crimes committed nationwide, and every week two women are murdered by a partner, ex-partner or lover.’

‘That two women a week stat is out of date,’ Deborah Kerner intervened. ‘The recent trend is down a little?’

There was then a chill meeting of gazes between Deborah and Gail Hurd, the Kiwi-accented chief executive of Women United Against Domestic Abuse. Blaylock winced inwardly, feeling the instant rebuttal had struck a wrong note too soon.

‘Let’s say’, he offered, ‘that if it were one and three-quarters we agree that’s still too many. Please, Ms Hurd, go on.’

Lean, thin-lipped and black-suited, Gail Hurd held her acidulous look another beat before resuming. ‘As you know, there is a long, tragic history of cases where women died because warning signs were missed or ignored. Susan Hart, Emma Watts, obviously Marjorie’s daughter Vickie …’

Blaylock didn’t recall every case, but Mrs Marjorie Michaels was a subdued presence at Gail Hurd’s left – further supported at her other side by a solicitor, introduced as Anna Mann, a woman so large Blaylock had wished he could offer her a bigger chair.

‘We campaigners have heard assurances and apologies for years, and yet still women suffer because the same mistakes are made over and over. Government needs to show it understands, takes responsibility and offers leadership. At the moment, only you can do that.’

It didn’t seem a ringing endorsement. Blaylock cleared his throat. ‘Be assured, this is a priority. We do need to ensure women know how wide-ranging the police powers already are to pursue a suspect and make an arrest. But there are key areas where we seek improvements. You’ll know I will bring an Identity Documents Bill before the House—’

‘Yes,’ asserted Anna Mann. ‘We’ll be giving evidence on your draft to the Select Committee. Do we understand right that your database will hold all an individual’s old addresses? Because a security hack in that case could be catastrophic for women trying to escape an abuser.’