The Knives (3 page)

‘Must say, boss,’ Andy spoke up, finally, ‘you stuck a pretty good one on that lad.’

Blaylock exhaled in relief. ‘Well, I don’t reckon it puts any hairs on my chest taking a pop at a teenager. But he’d have wrapped that wrecking bar round my head if I hadn’t. Or his mate would, if you and the cavalry hadn’t shown up.’

Andy clucked his tongue, ever calm and solicitous about misfortune, as Blaylock imagined he was with his teenage son. ‘Funny, though. I could see, soon as I rocked up into the street – you were up on your toes and weaving. Did you box in the regiment?’

‘Christ, no. In the
regiment
they really boxed. I’d have had
seven bells knocked out of me.’ Blaylock chuckled, relaxing as a normally suppressed version of himself returned to the downstage of his person. ‘I did box in college at Durham, mind you. For a lark. I got roped in.’

‘How’d that happen?’

‘Oh, I was drinking in the bar one night and this lad I half-know staggers up, starts saying the boxing team’s one heavyweight short for a match the next day. I must have been half-cut ’cos I said, “Aw aye, I’ll step in, no bother, kidder.” I was thinking, “He’s more pissed than me, we’ll forget this by the morning.” But, oh no. No one forgot. So that was me in the ring the next night.’

‘How did you get on?’

‘I … got by. I remember that climbing through the ropes felt like a big, big act of willpower. But the lads just said, “Get out in the middle and throw punches for as long as you can breathe.” And right from the bell I just knew, the other lad was as green as me, he’d clearly been told the exact same thing. We were like two bloody windmills. Clinging to each other by the third round.’

‘Did you win?’

Blaylock affected a visor-eyed look of affront. ‘Of course, Andy. Points decision, like. I’d say there was
marginally
more blood streaming out of his nose than mine. I got back in the dressing room and the other lads – bastards – they just shook their heads and said, “Bloody fluke”.’

‘And after all the guidance they’d given you.’

‘Exactly. I did learn a fair bit, though, just from that one bout.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as how to get yourself braced and ready for someone running up to give you a massive clout.’

‘That
is
a good lesson, boss.’

‘Aye. And remains so.’

It was good to josh, in Blaylock’s view, though he knew he had to keep watch on the rougher things that amused him. He had
been told so by the Prime Minister.
‘David, not everything in life is a fight. And not every fight is necessary.’
He accepted the critique – and yet resisted it, too, feeling an urge to push back. At times his basic view was that the way he carried himself, all things considered, was a net-positive to the people he served, and that his critics on the touchline –
the bystanders who grab megaphones and make some noise, all the Twitterers and the gobshites
– they could take it and shove it.

He knew, nonetheless, what Paddy Vaughan meant. Others closer to him had made similar observations, with far less forbearance.

As the conversation ebbed in the car Blaylock’s ears tuned in to the
Today
programme on the radio, where news anchor Laura Hampshire was quizzing someone on the topic of Ziad al-Kasser.

‘
…
Is it not the case that Mr al-Kasser argues for independent Muslim emirates within the UK where sharia is law?’

‘That is so, and if you are a Muslim in Bradford or Dewsbury or Tower Hamlets then sharia is what you
should
want …’

Blaylock recognised the debating tones of the self-styled Abou Jabirman,
né
Desmond Ricketts, a former plasterer known to old friends as ‘Snowy’ – a Jamaican-British Muslim convert with a criminal record, now oft heard expounding in the media on matters of church and state.

‘… and in fact sharia is what a big, big part of our community
does
want and is comfortable with. So that wish should be considered legitimate and not to be, ah, interfered with or, ah,
demonised
.’

‘Yes, but do all Muslims in Bradford – even anywhere in the UK – do many Muslims consider, as Mr al-Kasser appears to, that women must accept Allah made them inferior, and that thieves should have their hands cut off?’

‘Well, you put things in your own words and out of their contexts but if you read the actual sermons of Ziad al-Kasser …’

Blaylock had already fished in the strongbox for a pen and a torn envelope, and now began to scribble notes for a letter to the BBC’s Head of News. Still, he overheard the next item – a report from the annual Chief Police Officers Conference, where Lancashire’s top cop was complaining of government cuts to their budgets.

‘They’re coming too thick and too fast. Just on my patch, month to month, thefts are up, burglary’s up, car crime and shoplifting up. So the government need to realise—’

Laura Hampshire cut in coolly.
‘I’m afraid, Chief Constable, I must stop you there, because Daniel Manningham is in south London for us, and we have reports coming in that the Home Secretary David Blaylock has been involved in a police incident near to his home in Kennington, an incident, I believe – is this right, Daniel? – in which Mr Blaylock helped to apprehend a criminal suspect?’

‘Yes, as we understand it, Laura, just before 6.30 a.m. police were called to this street by David Blaylock’s Scotland Yard protection team and bystanders have confirmed …’

Blaylock’s phone trilled and he checked the caller ID – Becky Maynard from his press office.

‘Good morning, Becky.’

‘Home Secretary, good morning, my god, are you okay?’

‘Of course.’

‘Are you okay to talk about it?’

‘Really. I’ve not got a scratch on me.’

‘Great, I mean, about how we handle it? The story? It’s going crazy here but my sense is the balance will come in positive for you, so it’s a definite opportunity to do something …’

Blaylock interrupted, seeing in his head the tumult of press officers now fielding five hundred calls. Briskly he dissuaded Becky from anything other than a brief statement. Slipping his phone back into his jacket he saw that Andy was regarding him with a half-smile.

‘Sir, just to say, in any sort of emergency – there’s really no point in your getting involved. I’ve got your back, y’know.’

Blaylock weighed his response for a moment or so. ‘Howay, Andy. We both know if I saw a real threat coming down I’d have that Glock off of you in two ticks. And I’d secure my own defence. But, cheers, yeah?’

Andy reclined sizeably into the Jaguar’s leather, as though to signal his ease at a ribbing from the boss; just as likely – Blaylock was sure – so as to let his tracksuit jacket slip fully open, the better to display the butt of the semi-automatic holstered snugly under his arm.

Back at home Blaylock showered, shaved and donned his navy Austin Reed suit, dodging the long mirror’s reflection, since it rarely lifted his spirits, and he needed to keep lively. The morning’s adrenalin rush was worn off, and familiar gloomier thoughts had moved back in.

He packed his ministerial red box with the day’s major pieces of paper. His speech to the police chiefs needed final sign-off. The latest – last? – round of objections to his legislation for identity cards had to be rehearsed. Cabinet would meet at 9.45 a.m. In two weeks’ time the House would rise for party conferences, and umpteen policy positions needed to be settled in advance. He had never felt more challengingly employed. And yet nor had he ever known such deep, overpowering moments of futility – not even at the lowest ebb of his tour in Bosnia.

As he was knotting his tie he heard Andy’s courteous rap on the bedroom door. He looked around the silent bedroom, to which he would retire, alone, come the evening – the unmade bed, the identical pressed navy suits hanging from the armoire doors, the desk stacked with colour-coded files, the panic button by the bedside lamp, the greying view through bulletproofed glass onto the Kennington square outside. This was the life he had made for himself
– its duties and burdens, its powers and restraints, its solitude and confinement. He threw the duvet across the mattress –
Box your blankets, sir! None of that civilian sloth!
– and opened the door to Andy.

Downstairs as he exited the front door he recognised a hand-addressed envelope atop his private mail on the console table, and he doubled back and slipped it into his pocket.

The Jaguar rolled up to the great glass-box estate of the Home Office on Shovell Street, SW1, and Blaylock shifted from the backseat. Evidently, word of the morning’s ruckus had spread. By the entrance the press had mustered a scrum – men in anoraks, some with heavy microphones, which they wielded as if to disconcert more easily jostled females. In his peripheral vision Blaylock clocked a second minor threat – a handful of placard-waving demonstrators, chanting in the standard spirited manner, but seeming now to shuffle down the pavement toward the entrance from the far-flung pitch where they had surely been told to stay put. Taken together, the two groups made a fair din.

‘STOP DETAINING WOMEN! RESPECT THEIR RIGHT TO BE FREE!’

‘Minister! Any comment on your punch-up this morning?’

‘STOP DETAINING WOMEN! RESPECT THEIR RIGHT—’

‘Mr Blaylock! Is this the first time you’ve hit someone?’

Andy muscled a path through and Blaylock, blinking under the barrage of camera flashes, pressed on. Yet before he could get to the door a diminutive young woman in a smart woollen coat, striding forward from among the chanting demonstrators, succeeded somehow in ducking through the press pack to point a bullhorn at his ear.

‘Home Secretary, do you think it’s right to deport an innocent woman to certain death?’

The wincing reporters seemed to care no more than Blaylock for the query or its volume. And with that Blaylock was safely inside the relative hush of the reflective sanctum.

He negotiated the full-body security gate through to the vaulting atrium that looked up to four floors of hive-like activity. Never did he cross this space without thinking of his arrival at the Home Office eighteen months previously: the formal ‘Welcome’ from staff, many of whom had thronged the atrium, more of whom stayed close to their posts, such that he had peered up and around the walkways and balconies while tight-lipped faces gazed down at him, and he had been struck by a mental image of himself brought before them in a torn shirt, bound by the wrists on the back of a tumbril.

His route to the lifts was intercepted by Becky Maynard, tripping lightly down the stairs from Level One, a gleam of resolve in her eye such that Blaylock had rarely seen. It occurred to him he ought to hit somebody more often.

‘Bravo, Minister,’ said Becky, politely but firmly. ‘Just to say, I hear your position loud and clear, and if any big requests come in I’ll only run them by Geraldine just so you’re aware.’

Then she was off again, before he could instruct her not to bother Geraldine either. Not for the first time Blaylock had the strange sense of being surrounded by women – formidable, all, with cool heads and level gazes. From their assessing looks he somehow always took the meaning that he ought to take a moment to turn aside and tuck himself in.

He made it into a lift unhindered, ascended to Level Three, stepped out and strode past the cluster of offices occupied by his junior ministers and, more substantively, the department’s Permanent Secretary, before reaching the comfort zone of his own private office team: the engine room of the building, his eyes and ears and buffers, clever young people sifting high stacks of paper while speaking clearly and intently into phone receivers cocked between shoulder and ear.

Geraldine – bespectacled, her unmanageable hair primped into a frizzy nimbus – came forward and greeted him with a nod toward
his office door. There, arms folded, clearly wanting a private word, stood his special advisor Mark Tallis. Tall, dimple-jawed, privately educated, Tallis was his spad with special responsibility for ‘press liaison’ and the one among them most aggrieved by having to sit out in open plan desk space, fully separated from his master by a stairwell. Civil Service fiat, however, had forced the spads away from any closer proximity, as if to degrade the imagined powers of their dark arts.

‘David, bloody good effort this morning,
patrón
.’

‘Cheers, Mark.’

‘You saw the
Post
, though, that toe-rag having a go—?’

‘Easy, just give me five minutes with Geraldine, okay?’

She had moved silently to their side and Blaylock bade her into the office then shut the door behind them. His desk sat before the furthest window so as to make a dauntingly long walk for any bearer of bad news. But he and Geraldine took seats around the oval group meeting table parked midway, and she passed him the usual sheet of A4 confirming his day’s schedule. He frowned at an unexpected Item 1.

‘Sorry, but can you squeeze in Sheikh Hanifa and his friend from Russell College before Cabinet? Fifteen minutes?’

‘You mean they’re on their way?’

‘It did seem urgent …’

Blaylock nodded. Geraldine then presented him with a pair of letters and he scanned them. The first, from Sir James Bannerman, politely notified him of what he had already read in the papers: that the ‘Sylvie Affair’ would be scrutinised internally. The second was on the letterhead of the Mayor of Tower Hamlets but ran to several sheets, with the unmistakable look of a petition:

The list of signatories was long and staunch. Blaylock passed the pages back to Geraldine with a nod. ‘Okay, I’ll need to speak to Bannerman, if His Holiness will grant me five minutes.’

‘Got it. The Inspector of Constabularies would like to ride with you in the car to the police conference tomorrow, is that fine?’

‘Tell him I’d be glad of his company.’

‘And can we tell Number Ten you’ll be at the black-tie do at the Carlton on Thursday night? They’re chasing all Cabinet members.’

‘Aye, if I really can’t get a better offer.’

Geraldine nodded and left. Blaylock moved to his desk, where a laptop sat dormant – his immovable note to self that all important exchanges in the building take place face to face, all important information pass from hand to hand. ‘
I don’t want people in this building lobbing grenades over email
’ had been his day-one decree.

Setting Geraldine’s one-sheet down he glanced to the silver-framed photo of his children: a posed studio portrait, their gift to him last Christmas, decently done. He liked to imagine the kids had come up with the idea, but suspected it was their mother’s initiative. Alex’s irked eyes betrayed displeasure in having to pose; Cora’s querulous look rather challenged the lens; but at the foot of the pyramid Molly’s smile was so wide she was probably saying ‘Cheese’.

Hearing footsteps Blaylock looked up to see the Permanent Secretary bearing down on him, having entered without a knock.

‘Good morning, Home Secretary. Heavens, if you wanted to come in late you needn’t have gone to such lengths.’

Thus Dame Phyllida Cox’s version of Managing a Situation with Humour, accompanied by a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Possibly she had learned it from a manual. From Cambridge via the fast stream, Phyllida had always commanded big jobs in big departments. Not that ‘command’ was a term she acknowledged. ‘By golly’ – she had assured him at their first meeting – ‘we are here to serve our Home Secretaries, not to make problems for them.’ That plural, though –
Secretaries
– had stayed with Blaylock, in its sense of successive ministers as mere fly-by-nights passing through a far more entrenched world.

Dame Phyllida stood six feet tall, her robust frame routinely softened – as today – by furled and pinned scarves, gemstone brooches and heathery-tweedy coats. Her nose was prominently curved and her cheeks coloured easily, whether from pique or discomfort or a generalised sense that things were not being done as the manual decreed. Blaylock saw her as a Head Girl type: her voice must have carried at assembly, and she would have been a useful bully on the hockey pitch. But he could imagine, too, the unrulier girls ganging up after lights-out to truss her vengefully into her bedsheets.

‘I’ve drafted this,’ said Blaylock, thrusting at Phyllida the envelope on which he had composed in the car. ‘A letter to the editor of
Today
, copied to the Head of News and the chairman of the Trust.’

She held it between finger and thumb as she perused. ‘Yes. I heard this. You’re really concerned? Laura Hampshire didn’t let the Jabirman chap get away on anything.’

‘Phyllida, I know newsrooms. Desmond speaks for nobody, but someone at the BBC either finds him very impressive or else they reckon he livens up their show. So they let him talk a load of garbage that’s totally detrimental to what we call “social cohesion”, right?’

‘Do you not think he’s rather beneath your paying attention to him? Or dignified, let’s say, by your picking a quarrel with him. You are a scalp to him in that sense, no?’

Not caring for Dame Phyllida’s tack, Blaylock was glad to see Mark Tallis sauntering up behind her, furled papers in one fist. But Dame Phyllida held her ground. ‘I expect you heard the complaints about police funding from the Lancashire Chief?’

Tallis eased into the single armchair set before Blaylock’s desk. ‘David’s already got his rebuttal in. Actions speak louder and all that. I just told Rob Gritten at the
Mail
, “Our message is that every citizen has a part to play in reducing crime on the streets, and the Minister has shown us this very day that he doesn’t exempt himself from duty …”.’

Dame Phyllida, ignoring Tallis, gave Blaylock some moments’ worth of a meaningful look, then turned and left. Mark unfurled and passed the papers he carried to Blaylock.

‘My polish on Phyllida’s draft of your speech to the cops.’

‘The last draft wasn’t Phyllida’s, was it?’

‘Not formally, but didn’t you spot how what had been crystal-clear was suddenly turned into mud?’

‘Right. So, what’s your beef with the
Post
?’

‘Didn’t you see? “The error-prone and volatile David Blaylock”? And Martin Pallister got two whole inches just to whack away at you.’

Pallister, Blaylock’s shadow on the Labour frontbench, was a seasoned media performer with aged-heartthrob looks and the dim aura of a lost leader. But Blaylock was unbothered by him, and vexed to see Tallis fret – hopeful of one day conveying to his spad that what the papers called a ‘crisis’ was usually manageable, and that he would pay no heed to such panicky language until the morning they had gathered sufficient dirt on him as to run a big thick-eared close-up of his bleary 6 a.m. face with DISGRACE etched above in big capitals. And on that day, maybe, they would be right – maybe he was a disgrace, maybe more than he or they knew. Today, though, was not that day.

‘Mark, listen – I don’t want you forever on the blower to the
hacks and hounding my critics on Twitter. Okay? You could use a bit of Deborah’s sangfroid. You’re not an attack dog. I see you as a deep thinker.’ He smiled. ‘Will you sit in with me and the Sheikh?’

Mark – having stiffened at the comparison to Deborah Kerner, Blaylock’s policy-specialist spad – seemed mollified by the boss’s jocular compliment and clasp of his shoulder, as Blaylock rose and moved to the door where Geraldine stood wearing her brightest ‘Now?’ face.

‘I was sorry to hear al-Kasser’s praises being sung on my Roberts radio this morning,’ said Sheikh Hanifa, making pained and rueful shapes with his hands. ‘Poison in the air. He speaks for no one. And it so
wearies
most Muslims. To be tarred with his brush.’

Blaylock had once assured Sheikh Hanifa that his door was always open, and the Sheikh had taken this literally. But his sexagenarian presence – round-faced, mild-eyed, silver-haired under a green-banded turban – was no burden, and his credentials were unimpeachable. Chaplain of Russell College, a twenty-year veteran of ‘inter-faith dialogue’, Hanifa was a man on whom successive governments had relied to provide reliable definitions of what in British Islam lay within the pale and what lay beyond.

As the tea trolley was trundled into the office Blaylock took the chance to discreetly look over the stranger Sheikh had brought with him, introduced as Ashok Mankad, Russell Professor of History and Head of Pastoral Care – a slight, doleful man in big black-framed spectacles.

‘Home Secretary?’ the Sheikh ventured. ‘We have, of course, just had our freshers’ weeks, and in chatting with Ashok I saw that both he and I noticed similar things, disturbing things, that have caused us concern. We have often spoken of the Islamic societies? Their calibre varies from college to college, some of high standard and great value to Muslim students. Others …’ The Sheikh shrugged and slowly set a glossy printed leaflet down on the table
before Blaylock. ‘Our society at Russell, we have had some disputes. Who keeps the key to the prayer room, what content is put on social media … But, it has been okay. Now, the society has connected itself to an organisation that is new to me, and already they have booked a series of talks that, well …’

Blaylock looked at the leaflet. It advertised a list of Islamic Society debates scheduled up to Christmas. The billings – ‘Does the Media Understand Sharia?’, ‘Can a Good Muslim Be Gay?’, ‘What Is Preventing a Palestinian State?’, ‘What is the Real Meaning of Jihad?’ – had a uniformity to Blaylock’s eye, as did the repeated listing of one Dr Ghassan Doumani as guest speaker. At the foot of the leaflet was the legend ‘In Association with the Institute of Islamic Praxis’.

‘Is this Institute by any chance headed up by Dr Doumani?’

Professor Mankad nodded. ‘A remarkably busy man.’

‘You can sense, I think,’ said Hanifa, ‘the tenor of what is proposed, the attitude to non-Muslims, to Israel, to same-sex relations … For the first-year students newly arrived to Russell, keen to join in activities … it sends a confrontational message, I think.’

Silently, glumly, Blaylock agreed. It was Russell he hoped his son Alex might attend to read Law in a year’s time.