The Knives (42 page)

Ignoring all calls, he stuck by the terse statement Mark Tallis drafted in his name, giving assurance that ‘all appropriate security measures’ were in place for the public’s protection while asking for their special vigilance. He further ignored Mark’s clear urge to discuss with him the angles of the foiled plot in light of possible advantages to the case for identity cards. He saw only new flaws.

He had asked Gavin Blount to call on him. First, though, Martin drove him to an artist’s suppliers where he bought an expensive set of oil pastels as a gift for Molly. Back at home he called the Islington number, at half-hour intervals, but got no answer, nor from Jennie’s mobile, on which he left a terse message: ‘If you think it’s right, Jennie, that I don’t get to see my daughter on her birthday then … I don’t know how you expect me not to take that badly.’ He did expect a response, however unfriendly, and yet gradually it became clear to him that no such call would be forthcoming.

A little after that, it further dawned on Blaylock that the boiler in the house had expired; it proved utterly resistant to manipulation. He paced around in the frigid air, feeling like a cold-blooded creature with no option but to keep in motion. When Blount arrived they sat in the kitchen over steaming teas; though Blount, to Blaylock’s quiet satisfaction, appeared not to feel the chill.

‘About the report I asked from you – I want you to broaden your thinking on what’s appropriate to the problem, security-wise. Consider the matter up for grabs. What’s the best joint deployment
of army and police? The best positioning for the military in the event of a crisis? Is there a case for a small permanent armed forces command as “homeland security”, say? What’s the capacity for armed response round the country, not just the Met and Manchester?’

Blount smiled into his chest, stirring his tea. ‘I get you. People will still recoil from some of this. It’s just not the British way.’

Blaylock shrugged. ‘We live in challenging times. If anyone’s in any doubt about what’s needed to counter extremism in this country, I have to say it’s perfectly clear to me what we really depend on – surveillance, legislation, detainment, armed officers … and luck.’

Blaylock watched the house darken and his breath begin to condense in the air. Still no call came from Jennie. At 4.30 p.m. he pulled on his topcoat, snatched up the carrier bag from the artist’s shop and told Andy they were going. Martin drove them to Islington, but the Alwynne Road house was darkened and silent.

Martin drove on to Upper Street, where Blaylock jumped out on foot and stalked down the pavement, peering through the glowing windows of pizzerias and upscale chicken shacks, familiar family-friendly haunts. But there was no joy. He sensed from the large presence at his shoulder that Andy’s silence was of a concerned, not wholly approving nature – that his bodyguard was somehow apprehensive over how things were tending – but this only irked Blaylock further.

He lurched back into the Jaguar’s backseat and slammed the door.

‘Martin, we’re for Notting Hill … Elgin Crescent?’

As grimly resolved as he was, he had anticipated more of a challenge once they reached the row of fine stuccoed townhouses. But his target was clear nearly at once, for a cluster of coloured
balloons was fastened to one big black door between Doric columns. He felt a sense of victory, however crabbed, and a confidence he would make his point, shame his opponents unostentatiously, show to his youngest how shabby had been the whole charade put up falsely in her name.

‘Okay, I will be ten minutes,’ he told Andy. ‘If I’m not out by then, you’re welcome to bust in with all guns blazing and pull me out.’

Andy looked at him pensively, nodded. ‘Sure, boss.’

It was only as he rapped on the door, an agreeable hubbub emanating from within, and imagined how the surprise of his face would be met that Blaylock felt some pang of regret. But it was burning in his chest now – the old familiar, heedless urge, pressing him on to the act from which sober contemplation would have steered him clear. The most urgent part of him believed rightness had to suffice, and no other self was strong enough to lay a staying hand on him.

A tall, solidly built youth in jeans and tee-shirt swung open the door with a mild smile that faded at once.

‘I’m Molly’s father,’ said Blaylock.

‘Sure, I know who you are,’ the youth nodded, and called back down the hallway. ‘Dad?’

Nick Gilchrist appeared from down a subtly lit hallway of framed pictures, looking solemn, his billowing white shirt spotted with fingerprints.

‘Ah, hello, David.’

‘Jennie and the children are here?’

‘Yeah, and a few others. You’d best come in.’

He came past and saw Jennie standing in subfusc at the threshold of a bright and busy kitchen, a long-stemmed wine glass uselessly in her hand, her face a picture of disquiet, he felt. Blaylock had the strangest sense that everything was perhaps a little worse than even he had imagined.

‘Not doing anything then, Jennie? So who are all these?’

She spoke in a tense hush. ‘Nick’s friends, the kids’ friends … You won’t know them.’

‘You want to show me around?’

‘How did you know where to come?’

‘Oh, I’ve my spies everywhere. Didn’t Alex tell you?’

She kept unhappily silent, and so, unwelcome, he glanced about him. The elegant splendour of the house was clear. Even from the hall Blaylock could appreciate the great gleaming kitchen ahead, busy with the keen chatter of adults and the splashy cries of kids, its floor-to-ceiling sliding glass looking out to a darkened expanse of garden. He realised abruptly that fixed to the wall by his head was a painting by Molly, a colourful collage of the type she favoured, organised around the word HOLLYWOOD.

Blaylock exhaled slowly, keeping himself together. ‘Okay. I don’t want a scene, I know the state of things, I just want to see Molly, give her my present, and my love. Obviously if you want to explain to me why all the subterfuge I’d say I’m entitled, maybe?’

Jennie and Gilchrist exchanged glances. Blaylock saw he had chosen ‘subterfuge’ correctly.

‘Nick, would you give us a moment?’ Jennie said heavily.

Gilchrist, clearly uneasy, nodded and retreated to the kitchen.

Jennie gestured up the stairs. ‘Will you …?’

‘David, we had a set of circumstances to consider, me and Nick and the kids, we’ve been mulling for a while … but we’ve come to a … quite a big decision, together.’

‘Yes?’ Standing in a tastefully lit and appointed bedroom with an expanse of snow-white duvet between him and Jennie, Blaylock felt a driving need to break the barricades that seemed to have been erected against him all around this house.

‘Okay. Nick is going to be in Los Angeles for some time, teaching
at one of the film schools, and working on a movie, a big studio drama thing.’

‘Good for Nick.’
Lonely for you
, he thought instantly.

‘It’s going to be two years at least. We all talked it over and worked it through and … we’re all going to LA. Me and the children.’

Blaylock had never heard anything quite so offensive or impossible. ‘You what? How’ll that work? I mean, the kids, Jennie …?’

‘Alex has a place at Cal Arts to do film. There’s a good high school for Cora, a good elementary school for Molly.’

‘C’mon, the cost, but—’

‘Nick’s got a good deal, I’ve been asked to lecture at Stanford, I may take the California bar. We’ve got a good rented house to start with, in Santa Monica, the children like it.’

‘Jennie … you can’t
abide
America, you never have.’

‘David,’ she shook her head, ‘that’s not true. Los Angeles is a much more cultured city than people think. The children are excited. I think they see a big adventure. I do, too.’

The preposterousness of the idea was only affirmed in Blaylock’s mind by Jennie’s shifty, muted seriousness, a marker to him of how bad ideas, without proper vigilance, could take on a worrying solidity.

‘Change is important, David, you have to do things while you can, seize them. The one life’s all we have. I know the timing may feel hard to you, I realise it’s a shock, but we didn’t intend secrecy, and it’s not been done lightly, it was a choice we had to make as a unit …’

‘Oh yeah? Molly and Cora got votes, did they? But not me?’ Now her deluded earnestness struck him as outright provocation. ‘When were you going to raise it with me, then?’

‘Not tonight …’ Her expression betrayed further discomfort. ‘But we’re going back out for New Year, and to sort out the house. My plan was to speak to you tomorrow, honestly.’

‘So this,’ Blaylock slashed a finger through the air, ‘this is a kind of a farewell party, am I right?’

Jennie suddenly looked more resolved. ‘It’s been a stressful time all round. But the kids and I want to keep this relationship together. This is who we are now. They’re happy and comfortable, and I’m heeding them as much as myself.’

He had ceased to hear. He felt heat rising in his face, his heart restive in his chest. ‘No, no. I don’t agree to this, Jennie.’

‘I know you’re upset but please don’t be blinded, don’t just blow—’

‘Aw fuck off. What do you expect me to do? Eh?’

He felt clenched all over. There was a knock on the door; unthinkingly Blaylock stalked across and flung it open, to see Cora looking at him with what he recognised as an awfully familiar unease.

‘Cora, it’s alright, love.’ In Jennie’s voice Blaylock heard far too much assumption of command. Cora looked a little too long before turning and fleeing back down the stairs.

Blaylock put a hand to his temple, mortally offended, a sense of entitlement beginning to burn there. ‘Okay, I want to see Molly.’

‘I don’t think it’s the time, David. I can see it on your face.’

‘Don’t fucking talk to me like that, how do you dare?’

‘
Please
, David, just … why not take yourself out of here for now and let’s meet tomorrow and talk then – I promise, we can reason this through.’

‘Yeah, we’ll do that then, now I want to see Molly.’

And he was off, moving down the stairs two at a time, feeling himself a force moving forward, parting the air in his wake. He ducked a head into Gilchrist’s double reception, noting a cherry-red guitar on a stand, laden bookcases, some heavy gilded trophies over a fireplace – and his son looking up at him warily from a velvet sofa where he had been engaged in conversation with some professorial adult.

As he powered on through the kitchen the eyes upon him were warier still and people stepped aside, some not quite as swiftly as was best for them – he was barging a path, but he didn’t care, being so much the unbidden guest, the unsightly beast off its leash. He wrenched aside the sliding glass door and saw, past the red coals of a cast-iron kettle barbecue, Molly and Gilchrist together in close conference out on the darkened lawn – Gilchrist down on his haunches, Molly grave and nodding silently.

Blaylock bore down upon them, trying to shift his features into a smile. But when Gilchrist, noting his approach, stood and stepped aside, Molly could not have looked more forlorn.

Blaylock stood before her, irritably aware that he was breathing heavily, and thrust out his unwrapped gift in its bag.

‘Hey, my darling, Happy Birthday.’

Molly’s face crumpled utterly, she lowered her head and ran past him toward the house. Spinning to look after her, Blaylock felt a paining bewilderment that, within an instant, felt vertiginous. When he recovered his head he could see Gilchrist staring at him with what looked very much like pity, and felt his last restraints snap.

‘Proud of yourself, are you?’

‘Listen, David, all I can—’

Blaylock advanced – Gilchrist anticipating enough to raise a hand – and threw a right hook through the defence, hitting his enemy awkwardly in the mouth, feeling his knuckles graze on teeth. Gilchrist reeled and crashed down heavily against the kettle barbecue, which toppled and spilled out its coals onto the grass by Gilchrist where he fell.

There was a frozen moment of shock, broken by Gilchrist’s heavy cries of pain, then people were coming at Blaylock from the lights of the house. Feeling himself deranged he grabbed a wooden garden chair and hurled it aside such that it crashed against a trellis.

And then he saw Jennie running toward him, flanked by dauntless men, and he was being surrounded and grabbed at, Jennie shrieking and stabbing a finger into his face before darting to the side of the fallen Gilchrist. For a moment he was still, consumed by the towering grotesqueness of the events he had caused, then a hand fell heavily upon him and he slapped it away, whereupon he truly found himself being seized and held fast at all sides.

More people were coming, Gilchrist was being helped to his feet, having restraint urged upon him, too, for Blaylock at last read true matching animosity in the man’s eyes. The air was thick with cries. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘He’s thumped Nick!’ ‘Someone get the police!’ ‘I’ve called them!’

‘Yeah, go fetch the fucking police,’ Blaylock snarled. ‘They’re right outside.’ It was then that he saw Andy Grieve coming through the glass door, his appalled face a clear sign of the sky having fallen.

By the time beat officers arrived to the scene, Blaylock had been penned to one corner of the garden by Andy and his Met protection team, who told him it was for his own good, whose eyes told Blaylock this was irretrievable. The beat officers’ hurried consultations with guests were audible to Blaylock above the hubbub, as was Gilchrist’s fiercely muttered ‘I’m okay, the bastard didn’t hurt me.’

Blaylock watched the officers listen, nod and nod again, then confer. Then one approached him. ‘Sir, I’m arresting you on suspicion of assault and battery. You do not have to say anything. However, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned—’

Blaylock shrugged off a second officer’s custodial arm.

‘Sir, if we need to restrain you we will.’

‘You’ll not put your hands on me, son.’