The Knives (16 page)

‘Eh? No, he’s fine. We had a good chat.’

‘Did he say he’s had a bit of stick at school?’

Blaylock frowned. This was an old story with Alex, and no fatherly exhortations to ‘whack ’em back’ had ever been considered helpful.

‘God. He’s old enough now, I’d have thought. Big enough.’

‘It’s not a physical thing,’ Jennie sighed. ‘They do politics in class, he’s in the debating club … they know you’re his dad.’

Blaylock bridled. ‘There’s not a lot I can do about that, is there?’

‘No, okay, and – calm down – Alex can handle it.’

‘Yeah well, but you bring it up, I mean – I come here to be with the kids, not just turn over a whole load of … dead ground.’ Blaylock was properly vexed, could feel his temples pulse.

Jennie’s eyes on him, though, seemed like a warning from history. ‘Why don’t you go into the living room and see Cora?’

Taking the hint Blaylock found his elder daughter lying on the red velvet sofa in a towelling dressing gown. She looked aside from her paperback with the upward twitch of her mouth that passed for greeting, and he stooped and kissed her warm forehead.

‘How are you, my love?’ he said, hunkering down on his haunches. But there was little he could extract from her. The book was called
Crocodile Soup
and it was ‘good’. She was taking Feminax and it ‘was helping’. Long and lean as her mother, already exhibiting a comparable brainpower, Cora was nonetheless a troubled girl. Over the past year she had appeared glum, her weight fluctuating like her mood.

Blaylock stroked her cheek, and in the silence she looked aside as if to say the thing was surely done? Blaylock pulled himself up awkwardly and returned to the hall, there to find Jennie waiting with her arms folded and a similar air of closure.

‘Alex!’ she shouted up the stairs. ‘Come and say goodbye to your dad.’ No answer. She looked at Blaylock and shrugged, to his chagrin.

‘That’s how it gets if you just let him squirrel away in his pit.’

Jennie rolled her eyes. The slackness of the situation Blaylock found profoundly riling. He now bounded up the stairs, and turned Alex’s door handle, only to find it locked. He knocked.

‘Alex? Can we say cheerio?’

‘
Hang on!
’ The voice from within was testy, over music.

Jennie had trooped up the stairway to be at Blaylock’s side – quite unnecessarily, he felt.

‘He’s locked the bloody door, what’s that about?’

It remained obdurately shut, and had gone quiet from behind. Blaylock bashed on it, hard, with the hub of his fist. ‘
Howay
, Alex.’

‘
Don’t
, David,’ Jennie said sharply.

Blaylock was clutching at the doorknob anew when the door was flung open by a glaring Alex.

‘“Cheerio”,’ said the boy. ‘
Okay?
Jesus!’ And he spun round and stalked back to a desk cluttered and piled with electronics.

‘Yeah, great, your manners are a bloody
delight
, son. Have a good week.’ Blaylock lunged and yanked the door shut.

Jennie was shaking her head, as though in age-old despond.

‘Don’t give me that look, Jennie, there’s no call for him to behave that way, no reason for you to indulge it.’

Blaylock could feel himself talking between his teeth, could feel the tautness across his face. And even now, after all the years, he was hoping she would give in, change her weather, see the force of his feeling as an insuperable argument and surrender to it. She did not.

‘You don’t understand what you sound like … the effect you have. You never do.’

‘Well, that’s an old one, so …’ He took the deepest breath he could draw into his tightened chest. ‘So, I don’t know what you want me to say.’

‘You don’t need to say anything. Not to me, okay? But one day, you might want to just
try
to change your ways. For their sake,
and for yours. I mean – it would be better for you, to find a solution.’

‘Solution to what?’

‘To your problem, David.’

‘And what is my fucking …’ – he caught himself. ‘What is my problem, Jennie?’

She was looking meaningfully, authoritatively, head tilted as if to say the answer was self-evident. Then the phone was ringing and she turned, she was done with him, she was trooping back down the stairs.

‘Hello, Jennifer Kirkbride …?’

Blaylock took a moment, swallowed, knowing he was alone and out of place. Once he was back in the Jaguar he would have returned to his serious life, his packed schedule and hand-tailored arrangements and weighty responsibilities, and he would leave behind these hopeless complexities and tangles of ill feeling that, strictly, belonged to the past and ought really, for the good of all parties, to be abandoned there. He marched down the stairs and out through the door directly.

‘You okay, boss?’

In the gloom of the backseat Blaylock realised that he ought not for so long to have been holding his hand over his brow as if to shut out a painful sunlight. Looking up now he saw Andy looking back at him with far too much concern.

‘Yeah, yeah. Fine, thanks, Andy. No bother.’

‘I’m sorry, boss. It can be tough sometimes, I know. Family and stuff … I mean, I don’t want to be out of line.’

‘No, no.’ Blaylock pulled himself upright and together. ‘Listen. There are faults on both sides. It’s a long story.’

He had always believed he would see her again. When he agreed to troop along to Durham alumni drinks – albeit in what he rated a bloody dreadful basement bar in Soho – it was only with Jennifer Kirkbride in mind. For nearly an hour the rackety music and forced chit-chat were just as bad as he’d feared; but the lift in his chest when he saw her descend into the cramped space redeemed it all.

And it was she who sought him out, took him aside, bought him a pint. There was something new in her eyes. She had heard all kinds of things. He had left the army? Become an aid worker? Worked for a bit as a stonemason? All true, yes, but first he insisted they talk about her.

She spoke forcefully of far-ranging travels and encounters, volunteering with Médecins Sans Frontières, election monitoring in Thailand, time spent in Burma that was so appalling as to focus her mind on the law. While he was in Bosnia, she had been called to the Bar.

Inwardly he admitted: he had thought her narrow in certain ways, ‘armchair’ in her convictions. Now she had been undeniably seasoned, broadened, by meaningful exchanges with all sorts of people in varying predicaments. Remarkably, she had got a little bit more beautiful, too. But when she directed the conversation back onto him he came to feel somewhat cross-examined.

‘I wanted to find out if I could lead men. They call it moral courage. I didn’t have enough, sadly. It was more about just getting by.’

‘Listen,’ she said, rather sternly, rattling her straw around her glass, ‘I’ve met a few good soldiers, and what they had in common
is they all said they weren’t good soldiers.’

He was questioned very closely about Northern Ireland. Wagering on what he took to be her sympathies, he spoke of how he had intervened to curtail some heavy-handed police treatment of two youths suspected of chucking petrol bombs. He had earned some kudos for that on the streets of West Belfast, also now, it seemed, from Jennie.

‘You were in Bosnia how long?’

‘Uh, five months. Felt like longer.’

‘But you went back after the war?’

‘Yeah. To be honest the aid stuff had been what seemed most helpful to the people while we were supposed to be soldiering. Hosting tea parties for children and stuff …’

‘As a soldier you were stopping ethnic cleansing.’

‘No, no, no. We
assisted
ethnic cleansing …’ He didn’t wish to mire her in the bitter recall of it all. Yet he did feel a need to confess, a deep-seated wish that she understand; and so he recounted the hopeless mission of United Nations forces in Vitez.

‘The job was just fucking impossible. I mean, I knew within a week why we needed to be there, if we were honest.’

‘Why was that?’

‘To stop the fucking extermination of a load of Muslims, right in the heart of Europe, by a fucking pact of convenience between two lots of fascists who were more or less open about their intentions.’

He was near to spitting with long-suppressed anger, it felt like an unburdening of truth. Yet, still, he didn’t trust himself. The remorse, he knew, was still a kind of mask, or restraint. There remained things he couldn’t bear to tell her. His hands on the table had curled into a fist, and Jennie laid her own hand on top of it and looked at him levelly.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s so bleak.’

‘Don’t be. You’ll have seen dreadful things, I know.’

The conjuring power of care in her voice put another image into his head, the face of a slight, toothy little girl looking up at him helplessly, in an instant before the sky fell in.

He felt his restraints snap and got a hand to his face in time, shuddering for a few moments, grateful for the dark oblivious din of the bar but desperate to pull himself together. Her hand went to his shoulder and stayed there.

‘I’m really sorry,’ she murmured. ‘Have you ever talked to anyone about it? Properly? Did the army offer you help?’

The ‘it’ she had intuited was not what had upset him, but she had given him an excuse, at least, to speak of something else.

‘There was a psychiatrist I could have seen, but I never did. I didn’t see it would do any good.’ That much, he knew, was true.

Not long after, they were standing outside in foot-stamping cold looking very intently at one another as their peers stumbled by, noisy with booze and plans for going on.

‘Listen,’ she told him. ‘I want you to know, it means a lot to me, that you shared what you did. That you’ve got the strength to do that.’

‘To be so weak, you mean.’ He laughed softly, but she shook her head.

‘Where are you going now?’

‘I’m not sure. Do you want to go on?’

She slipped her hand into his and squeezed lightly. They began to walk, in silence, and he had no clue where they would go and kept his eyes doggedly on the stunningly starry night sky. But on a quiet street they paused, and inclined their heads to one another, and the kiss was of a sweetness Blaylock could have believed fatal.

They caught a night bus to her flat, she led him to her room, charmingly cheerful now, unfussily carnal as they undressed, then grinning up at him, breathless yet notably in control, her black hair across the white pillow, her smile full of moonlight. Nonetheless, as he moved inside her she seemed very serious,
and he was relieved, since for him the whole business was near enough a sacred rite. What troubled him as they clung together warmly afterward was that there had been some kind of thievery in his capture of her.

Six months later they were married, she six weeks pregnant. At their wedding dinner she, naturally, took a turn in the round of speeches.

‘I want you all to know why I love this husband of mine. He is a good and kind man, an honourable man.’

He loved her for saying it, sure, but he could feel fear in his gut, too – fear for her high opinion of him, of what it was founded on, that it couldn’t possibly last. He wondered now if their wedding day was indeed the last time she held such a view wholeheartedly. When, exactly, had she ceased to believe in his integrity?

In retrospect he could see that by the time they took their vows – their child in her belly, her hand decisively won – he had resolved that it were a better thing he kept a veil over the extreme starkness of his tender love for her, that low fire he had tended for years. He felt he had shown her quite enough of his vulnerability – believed that she needed to see him as more stoical and load-bearing, per the tough individual experiences of the world that had, finally, brought them together. Thus, in order to be her husband, one final self-overcoming on his part appeared needful. Yet as a consequence of that strange contrivance he seemed, fatefully, to turn himself into a lesser man.

Their marriage – in his view, at least – had been a wordless pact that they would face the world together with a shared sense of what was right and good in it. Yet he had wondered from the start if he could really live up to his side of the bargain. In time he wondered, too, if she didn’t question her own part in it. In any case, that first strong bond had been steadily worn, by compromises made out in the world and toward each other, ardour slowly turning to an affectionate familiarity and a taking for granted of
their respective services to the family firm; then to withdrawal from one another; then decline into mutual hostility.

However had it got so bad, so debased? That their happily chattering children began to make noise just to drown out their forever quarrelling parents? That he ceased all efforts to comfort Jennie, communicate with her, dry the tears and make things better? That the children came to see him as the man who was absent, who no longer kept promises, who slammed doors and shouted through them? In his head he could hear his own hateful voice, from right near the death:
‘You can’t believe I would hurt them, you can’t say that, Jennie!’

She had looked haunted on the day she asked him to leave. She wept while he stayed dry-eyed. But when the front door closed on him he could not have imagined something so terminal.

It had hit him the harder, no question – the voiding of all sureties, the sense of irreparable breakage. She had decided their love was done and had acted on it so bravely; he had been trying ever since to catch up. But it was hard work when – with no intention, by the slightest gesture – she could still remind him of a sky full of stars.

His phone rang, the hour so late that he flinched.

‘Sir, it’s Neil Hill of SO15? I’ve good news about your hoax caller, sir. We’ve got him.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘No, sir, the call you received on Friday was from a payphone and the CCTV coverage of the vicinity was first-rate, so we identified our suspect and traced him pretty quickly. We lifted him from a flat in Wood Green tonight, and we have now arrested him on suspicion of malicious communications and of making threats to kill.’

‘My god. Who is he?’

‘An Algerian gentleman, sir, by the name of Yucef Medhkour. In the room he’s renting we found some paperwork indicating that he’s been going through the process with your department of seeking leave to remain? Basically, he’s not had any joy, I dare say he wasn’t very happy about it. His thing is sound engineering, all sorts of toys in his room, so we suspect that’s how he made those effects you reported.’

The simple logic of it all flooded into Blaylock’s mind and he received it gratefully, thanking the detective for his cares. He was ready to hang up and be done when one stray thought occurred.

‘The tap on my phone, that’ll come off as of now?’

‘That would be a reasonable assumption, sir.’

‘So will someone come and – take the phone off me, do the business?’

‘No, no, sir, we’ll just turn off the surveillance remotely …’

The call complete, Blaylock stood up, paced the room, lifted by the efficiency with which that bit of nastiness had been cleared
up, relieved that, for all that he had refused to let it get to him, he could at least forget about crank calls for a while. It was, he accepted, the nature of the job that one had enemies. He preferred them, though, to be visible.

He went to his desk, took the pages of his conference speech and attacked the text anew with red pen. After forty-five minutes of sustained improvement, he rose, stretched, changed into tee-shirt and shorts and bounded down to the kitchen where Andy sat with the
Sunday Times
.

‘Get your runners on, bonny lad, I just need to blow off some cobwebs.’

Out on the wet and inky Kennington streets he felt his calf muscles twanging routinely, his back bowing and aching at first, but within ten minutes he was striding cleanly, planting his feet, breathing evenly and feeling a good cold air against his chest. Andy was running more or less apace this time, and that seemed the right place for such an ally.

As vigorous as he was feeling, he found his thoughts snagging on the people and predicaments he knew to be persistently in his way, obstructive, unhelpful, hectoring, even outright pernicious – the ridiculous Desmond Ricketts, the pushy Paul Payne, the conniving Jason Malahide, the wily James Bannerman. He indulged himself for the moment, saw himself running right through them, scattering their plots and plans like ninepins.

Right then, right. I’ll not be deterred, not me. Not by the stirrers or the frauds or the nutcases. I’m going to stay my course, do my job. And yeah, I might be wrong, I might be right, but let’s find out which. I’m ready to be judged. Let people make their minds up about me on the facts, not on rumours and lies and things that happened aeons ago. I’ve got my case and I’ll stand up and try it – let the jury decide. I’ll know by the eyes if I’ve done it or not. But it can be done. It can all be done, and it will be done …