The Knives (25 page)

Blaylock saw young Chris had clapped a hand over his mouth, though his eyes shone. It was indeed a stunning prank. He moved
hastily out of shot, even as the first words on the door erased themselves to be replaced by others:

That evening, as he sat in his study in semi-darkness before a laptop, nursing three fingers of Macallan, Blaylock took a call from a chastened-sounding Richard Colls.

‘The perpetrators got away through the park, David, but they had to dump the kit they’d been using, and we retrieved it. Basically it was handheld laser projection – like a laser graffiti gun? It was wired up to a laptop in a canvas bag, and a computer program did the animation bit so it looked like paint.’

‘Ingenious,’ muttered Blaylock, swilling his medicine round his glass tumbler.

‘So you know, there’s a mob online have claimed credit for it through social media. They’re called The Correctors, online is sort of where they seem to live. We’ve had some sight of them before at protests, demos and whatnot, that’s what they do – pranks and stunts and flash mobs, with that sort of anti-capitalist, anti-establishment angle. There’s a fair old archive of stuff related to them if you do a Google video search …’

Within minutes Blaylock sat clicking through YouTube sidebars. It was remarkably easy to find traces of his alleged tormentors, and their repertoire of sound and image felt remarkably familiar to him.

The most substantial piece of work he found started sharply, backed by a doom-laden score, with a quick-cut montage of what an inter-title called ‘callous, unfeeling elites’ – world leaders, bankers, other forms of grinning well-heeled scum. His pulse hardly jumped when his own face jumped out at him amid the blink-editing. Was he entering the Carlton Club a few weeks previous? It was all too brief.

The imagery changed to tumultuous scenes of visible poverty, streets reeling from bomb-blasts, glaring lines of police in riot gear. Then, consonant with a fade to black, came the kick of dub reggae, ushering in scenes of placard protesters, vociferous marchers, the dancing and jigging and grinning of passionate youth. A
vox populi
offered snatches of affirmative speech by an interchangeable succession of students, some of them masked.

Then, finally, something Blaylock saw and heard made him sit up.

‘Define The Correctors? I can’t do that … This is a movement, and that means – it moves, it doesn’t stand still. The Correctors are just a vehicle for ideas, and no one person is driving. No one can get in its way, either.’

The white translucent plastic mask had successfully anonymised the speaker’s face, but the halting conviction of his voice, not to say his sculpted crest of hair, would have been known anywhere by his father.

‘But there’s no logo, no platform, no tee-shirt … I just think what we’d say is that our ideas, our energies, are for the people, and against the neoliberal world order. The enemy is neoliberalism, and its ringleaders, and its apologists. We have to fight them. Their errors must be corrected.’

The piece concluded with a sequence of title-cards.

Blaylock poured and knocked back a second, short whisky. A powerful instinct told him to get on the phone to Jennie. Some
other force, fractionally more compelling, told him that her view would not be his view, the outcome nothing like what he rightly or wrongly wished for.

Keep your powder dry
, he told himself, pouring once more.

Dominic Moorhouse was aggrieved. And if the Foreign Secretary was not an imposing figure – rather, with the look of an outsized school debater, frowning under his big specs and waves of hair – he was straining to make himself forcefully clear to Blaylock.

‘The ambassador came to see me yesterday to express his extreme dissatisfaction over the revoking of this deportation order for Eve Mewengera? David, I’m struggling to understand what possessed you to undermine our position and cause us such a diplomatic embarrassment with a government whose friendship in the region is so significant to us. I mean … was somebody
getting
at you?’

‘I received demonstrations, yes, Dom. After I reviewed them I formed the opinion, whatever the
realpolitik
of the thing, that this woman just shouldn’t have to go back there.’

‘Right, and should we be prepared for your taking any more of these kinds of unilateral decisions, now you’ve opened the door?’

‘I really hope not, Dom. What I hope is that Ms Mewengera’s case is the exception I believe it to be. If it’s not, then what else would you expect from me?’

Patrick Vaughan, seated next to them in the position of adjudicator, was regarding Blaylock with one of his stock expressions of brow-creased botherment. ‘It
is
a bloody odd thing for you to have done, David.’

But Blaylock simply didn’t think the Captain cared enough. And for his own part he was growing weary of being hauled in early before Cabinet to account for himself like the errant schoolchild.
Diane Cleeve was due in to see him later, and the requirement of best behaviour weighed heavily enough on him already.

In Cabinet proper, Blaylock briefed colleagues by rote on his agenda for the bi-monthly Consilium in Brussels where he would meet with his European counterparts. He told the table he would be pressing for bilateral agreements on restricting free movement rights within the EU. No one believed he would achieve that. He told them he would push Germany to release advance passenger data from its airlines. He didn’t even believe himself on that one. Everyone in the room knew that to make a fuss of principles in Europe was a mere performance. ‘Serious concerns’ were to be acknowledged, not addressed; a ‘coherent European response’ was a non sequitur; an ‘action plan’ was no such thing. A ‘working party’ was the best, dreariest option one could expect. Thus Blaylock went through the motions.

At Shovell Street Adam Villiers and Brian Shoulder came to see him, Villiers with an update on the absconded risk certificate Haseeb Muthana. ‘We believe he’s got as far as the North Waziristan borderland. He may have gravitated toward the village nearest to the training camp he attended five years ago.’

Blaylock merely nodded, hopeful that Muthana, having dragged himself so far from sight, might also be put out of mind.

‘On the subject of the Free Briton Brigade …? Something of note, perhaps. I had begun to wonder – in light of the sophisticated design of their website, their growing links to international organisations – who was paying for their paper-clips, as it were? Obviously they have some keen and voluble activists, this Gary Wardell for one … However, I wasn’t persuaded it was adequate to keep their gravy train in motion. Then this man lately began to append his name to their public pronouncements.’ Villiers slid a landscape ten-by-eight photo across the table. ‘Do you recognise him by any chance?’

Blaylock peered closely at a fifty-ish man with crinkled features under a tweedy flat cap, dressed as for a football match in a Harrington jacket.

‘His name is Duncan Scarth, he’s a bit of a whiz in commercial property, a millionaire many times over. Has donated to the Conservative Party in years gone by. Keeps homes in Geneva and Oslo, but also in your constituency. He’s from your neck of the woods …’

With an aperture thus prised open, Blaylock now felt the past flood in. ‘Oh yeah. My god. We were at school together. He’s got to be five years older than me, mind you. But, yeah – he was an entrepreneur alright, used to run his own tuck-shop at break-times. I don’t remember him banging on about sending the buggers back, but that’s not to say he didn’t hold those views …’

‘Has he tried to contact you lately?’

‘Not that I know of. Do you expect him to?’

Villiers shrugged, reclaiming the photograph. ‘No, no. Just a thought. Given that connection.’

Blaylock prompted Mark Tallis to his feet as Geraldine showed Diane Cleeve into the office, at her side the big shaven-headed man Blaylock remembered from the previous week’s memorial service.

‘Mr Blaylock, this is Pastor Ruddock. I joined his congregation recently and we’ve been working together on certain projects.’

Blaylock accepted the powerful handshake of the pastor, beside whom Mrs Cleeve was birdlike, his bulk packing out the seams of his dark suit. Yet Blaylock did sense some kind of mindful rapport between them, as he found himself a little guiltily picturing their running a pub together in some seaside town.

‘Thank you for making time for me.’

‘Always, Mrs Cleeve. Please, sit.’

She beheld him with the frowning directness he well knew.
‘First thing you ought to know, as of this week I am quitting Remember the Victims, that association will be at an end.’

‘I see. A big step. Can I ask, are you—?’

‘It’s time to move on. Other people will take it forward, I don’t doubt, but from my side the work’s done.’

‘They’ll miss your leadership.’

‘I don’t think so. It can go on being what it is, which is a victim support group. What I’ve come to feel is, if you’re not careful then it keeps you a victim. Nothing changes. What I’ve observed, Mr Blaylock, is that years go by and people stay angry and bitter, and what they suffered just defines who they are. And that’s stifling, I’d say. You need to find a way to breathe again …’

‘Well, I certainly respect that—’

‘The second thing I want to speak with you about is Jakub Reznik.’

‘In what regard? Is it his minimum term?’

‘A month back I got a letter from him, and the other week I went to visit him in prison.’

Blaylock had been startled. ‘What – was in the letter?’

‘An apology. Not his first. You’ll recall he tried to cut his wrists last year, and the chaplain who saw him told me he was full of remorse. I didn’t care, obviously. I’d heard he’d been violent since he went in. I’d thought, excuse me, but what can you do with a bastard like that?’

‘It’s a special problem of the life sentence,’ Pastor Ruddock spoke up. ‘Prisons got their own culture. As a lifer you carry that stigma, nothing you do means anything. So, what you get is worse violence.’

‘This letter.’ Mrs Cleeve paused, uncharacteristically. ‘Reznik, he said he’d taken Jesus as his saviour – that he must have had the devil in him, when he done when he done to Lisa? And he’d been praying to God for forgiveness, but he didn’t think that was “possible”. So he’d started praying to Lisa instead.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Blaylock, fearing he would lose the thread.

‘He begun praying to my daughter? Being as how that’s who he sinned against. And he said that one night, in his cell, he’d heard Lisa’s voice speaking back to him. Saying he’d done a despicable thing, but it was in his hands to redeem himself. As a human being. Before God.’

‘Does the prison have an opinion of his mental state?’

‘Ah, you think he’s barmy?’ Mrs Cleeve looked to Pastor Ruddock, who cleared his throat sizably.

‘You could see it another way, sir. Which is that he’d come to a proper view of his sins – a spiritual understanding, if you get me? There’s a sentence on all of our souls, sir, then one day we die, and sentence is passed. Some men, they don’t see that – or they see it too late. But them what sees it in time …?’

Pastor Ruddock looked to Mrs Cleeve, who resumed. ‘Yeah, like I say. I went to see him – Reznik. I felt driven to it, is what I’d say. I sat across from him like I’m sitting across from you now. And he sat there, sobbing, like his old man at the trial. Looked about as broken down as his old man, too, so he did. And, I tell you, I could believe he had the devil in him when he killed Lisa? ’Cos there’s nothing there any more. Just this wretch of a man, all eaten up. I looked at him and I thought, what he’s done to my life, how he lives with it, how I live with it … And part of me thought, how could he dare? And another part—’

Mrs Cleeve stopped, looked aside, exhaled heavily.

‘You think of all you’ve been through – because you’ve only got this life, just this one – and what you do with it – I sat there and, I felt something
rise
inside me, almost lifting right out of me? As powerful as that. And I thought, “Is this what forgiveness is?” I’m all for punishment, see. He’s been punished, Reznik, like he should. Most likely he’ll die in prison. But I’ve got to thinking now – about forgiveness, what it can do?’

Blaylock saw that, as intently as Mrs Cleeve was looking at him, Pastor Ruddock’s gaze was equally fixed. ‘Just as repentance
is a true Christian idea, Mr Blaylock, forgiveness is a gesture of true goodness. It has wonder-working power.’

‘Forgiveness,’ said Mrs Cleeve. ‘I want to encourage it in people. I want to encourage it in me. And what the European Court’s saying it wants? To give a life prisoner a chance of a review of their sentence? See if they’ve changed, if there’s any good there? I want to support that. I want to say, okay, maybe a person can atone. So that’s what I’m doing now. And I’d like your support.’

Blaylock had listened in a state of mounting discomfiture. ‘Mrs Cleeve, first … I obviously respect the sentiments you express. But it’s the settled view of this country that certain crimes merit whole-life orders, and that how long those who have killed should spend in prison is a matter for our Parliament and our courts. It’s not possible for me to endorse your thinking as you ask.’

‘Did I not hear you lately talking about, what – “restorative justice”? Respecting the victim’s wishes? Thought you were all for that?’

‘For petty crimes by kids who didn’t know better. Not murder. A bereaved parent could be sat where you are, demanding I bring back hanging. I’d only say what I say to you, our courts administer justice.’

‘You’ve got the power, haven’t you, to review a life sentence? On compassionate grounds? You can pardon people if it came to it?’

Blaylock shook his head. ‘I can allow a terminally ill prisoner to die at home, not inside. Pardons are for the innocent, Mrs Cleeve.’

‘You know, that almost seems a waste to me.’

Blaylock felt a desperate need to shift the discussion onto ground where he might feel firmer. ‘Have you considered that this decision of yours might impact on the valuable work you’ve done with Remember the Victims, the solace it’s given people?’

‘If people were consoled, they were consoled. This is something I’m doing for me. Who’s to say it won’t be just as valuable?’

‘And, forgive me, but – have you considered the possibility Reznik was playing some sort of stratagem?’

‘Of course. I’m not a fool. I made a judgement. And I can tell, Mr Blaylock, you ain’t comfortable with it. You’re rather my position stayed the same. Closer to your position, yeah? “Tough on crime” and that. So if we have our photo taken together it’s like we’re saying the same thing. Well, my position is what it is now, and it’s up to you if you still want to stand beside me.’

As Blaylock groped for a response Mark Tallis leaned forward. ‘It will be a tough position for the general public to accept, Mrs Cleeve. In fact, it could get quite tough on you.’

‘Tough? Do me a favour. After all I been through? I’ve told my mum what I’m doing, my ex-husband – they’re in bits about it. So what do I care what a load of strangers think? Is that all
you
care about?’ She focused wholly on Blaylock. ‘I’m talking about rehabilitation, the chances of that. Do you not believe in it? I’m appealing to you as a man.’

‘I’m sorry to say, in this office I hold … I don’t get the luxury of what you’re describing – of just doing the things I happen to believe in that I might think are right and good.’

It seemed then to be Mrs Cleeve’s turn to display incredulity. ‘My god, don’t say that. That’s a desperate thing to say. How can you sit there and say that?’

‘I’m not sure’, Blaylock said quietly, ‘what else we can discuss.’

‘No, me neither.’ She stood, deeply dissatisfied, and Pastor Ruddock stood too, albeit with a look that suggested he had truly expected no better.

‘I’m sorry I can’t do as you ask. I hope – you might yet think some more about this.’

‘Are you serious? After all what I told you. No. It’s interesting, but, the sense I get of how you make your decisions. What your priorities are? More people ought to know, I think.’

As Blaylock retook his seat Tallis looked up from absorption. ‘Well, that was insane.’

Blaylock sighed. ‘It’s an unfortunate end to – an association.’

‘I can’t believe how she tried to box you in on the restorative justice thing.’

‘She’s … a tough character.’

‘Not as tough as her minder. The so-called pastor? My guess would be that’s a man with excellent reason to believe in forgiveness …’

‘Listen, Mark – I don’t totally disdain the view she’s arrived at … I just don’t think it will make sense to anyone but her.’

‘That’s her choice. My concern,
patrón
, is if she decides to make trouble for you. I just think possibly you said too much? Essentially you did tell her that you do a bunch of things you don’t actually believe in. You think she wouldn’t use that against you down the line?’

‘Mark, howay, don’t me make feel worse than I do already.’

Tallis only shrugged his shoulders as if to say it couldn’t be helped.

Come 6 p.m. he was alone with his papers for the Brussels Consilium when Geraldine knocked and entered with a shy look of a kind he rarely saw.

‘Um, David, some nice news, the
Criterion
magazine just mailed to say congratulations, they’ve chosen you as their “Politician of the Year”.’