The Knives (6 page)

Blaylock found himself staring at one such application, made against a youth whose sins amounted to ‘accessing extremist material on the internet’. Considering it a worthwhile exercise to
query the spooks once in a while, Blaylock picked up his secure telephone to MI5. In the next moment his BlackBerry beeped and he checked the screen. It was a text from his ex-wife Jennie:
Just heard the news about your run-in this morning!? You okay? Jx

He thought for a moment, picked up the device, and started to tap out a reply. The effort to sound both laconic and glad of her concern took him some moments more than he had planned for, such that when Geraldine knocked and re-entered he had forgotten his qualms over the stray warrant. He signed it and passed the pile
in toto
over to Geraldine.

At lunch-hour Norman Dalton, Minister for Policing, rapped on Blaylock’s door, back from the first morning of the Chief Police Officers Conference and instructed to debrief Blaylock on the mood. Dalton bore two bacon butties from the greasy spoon in the next street, and he and Blaylock stepped out to seek one of the seated areas dotted round Level Three where staff members could eat lunch. Passing the line of black pod-like soundproofed cubicles provided for quiet solo work, Blaylock found himself, as ever, imagining staff accidentally trapped inside and shrieking for help unheard; or else stealing crafty naps with their heads cradled in their arms.

They found chairs and Dalton unwrapped his treats. Blaylock found Dalton canny and competent, a seasoned fifty-something albeit with the look of an outsized schoolboy, perpetually pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose.

‘So, Bannerman’s speaking tomorrow?’

‘Yes, that’ll be your pleasure if you get there early. I hear he’ll go big on reasserting the Met’s operational independence. Anyone would think he was feeling threatened. I had to listen to Martin Pallister being his irrepressible self, giving it the full class war. “Them bloody Tories, looking down their noses at the honest British bobby, they just want a better class of officer what talks proper, don’t you know?”’

‘He didn’t actually
say
that?’

‘He certainly said that Tories have a problem with the, I quote, “ordinary working-class make-up of our rank-and-file police”.’

‘Well I never …’

If pushed Blaylock would have said he had greater problems with the Rotarian
petit bourgeois
make-up of police chief constables. He had suffered enough dinners with them as they dawdled over desserts and
digestifs
, their waistlines and self-estimations swelled by six-figure salaries and gold-plated pensions.

‘Anyhow, Pallister got cheered to the rafters. I dunno, it feels like a bit of a
goading
atmosphere in the place, chief. Take your tin hat.’

‘I’ve a few bones to throw. It’s not all make-do and mend. We’re saying there’s money for hi-tech innovation; there must be some in the crowd who think it’s better the cops have gear that’s at least as good as the phones they’ve got in their pockets?’

‘Maybe. But, you know – stick a camera on every copper and there’ll be some reckon it’s there to watch them, not the baddies. You might need one or two more bones …’ Dalton wiped ketchup off his fingers. ‘You know, after you they’ve given the big evening speech to Madolyn Redpath? She’ll give us a pasting, you know what she’s like.’

‘I don’t. Never heard of her.’

‘You sure? She was outside the building just now waving a bullhorn in people’s faces …’

Dalton struggled to his feet and jerked a thumb toward a long window with a vantage on the Shovell Street entrance. Blaylock got up and followed.

‘And, sorry, who is she?’

‘She leads on policy for Custodes, the civil liberties lot? Quite the crusader. And hardly out of school uniform.’

They peered through the window with their heads close together and could still make out a gaggle of demonstrators massed at the correct remove from the entrance. But the young woman with
the bullhorn appeared to have abandoned her post. On returning to his desk, however, Blaylock saw that a newly lodged petition sat atop his in-tray, calling for change in the conditions of women inmates awaiting deportation at detention centres. The covering letter bore the insignia of Custodes and the signature of Ms Madolyn Redpath.

Blaylock spent an hour on pointed business calls – ‘recorded meetings’ – with Cabinet colleagues, while Geraldine listened in on headphones, taking minutes amid pin-drop silence. Needing bones to throw to the cops, he secured from Simon Webster Justice’s continued funding for ‘neighbourhood courts’ to relieve police of processing blatantly guilty young offenders. Webster was blithe: ‘David, it’s a million saved in admin and court orders, so we’ll get top marks from Caroline.’

He was done in time for his regular briefing from Griff Sedgley, leading silk at the chambers that took a lion’s share of Home Office briefs. Hawkish of feature, fastidious of collar and cuff, Sedgley exuded a leather-bound quietude by which Blaylock was always assured.

Their chief item of business was the protracted extradition to the United States of Vinayak Khan, a Londoner wanted for trial by Homeland Security on charges of aiding and abetting known terrorists. Khan had committed his alleged offences nearly a decade ago in front of a computer screen in Willesden Green – a ‘web-spinner’, as Blaylock saw him, joining up cyber-threads such that bomb-making instructions could be cleanly relayed across continents, or a weapons training camp disguised as outward-bound adventure in the wilds of Oregon. The European Court of Human Rights maintained that extradition should not happen before the outcome of a final appeal to the Grand Chamber in Strasbourg, to which Khan’s lawyers had made strenuous presentation that he be tried in the UK.

‘I’m not withdrawing the extradition order,’ said Blaylock.

‘If you don’t,’ murmured Sedgley, ‘you could be found in contempt of court.’

‘That would be a not madly inaccurate assessment of my view. Let’s see how the judge responds to Strasbourg tomorrow.’

They moved on to domestic business: eleventh-hour applications to overturn deportation decisions, most of them drawing on human rights law. A reformed Jamaican drug dealer, already booked on a flight back to Montego Bay, was poorly and pleading that he couldn’t hope to subsist anywhere but England. A Somali man with form for assault now awaited a plane to Mogadishu, but his lawyer argued that he would thence be in mortal danger from Islamist militants. To Blaylock the process always seemed a ladder, very often one step up and two back, there to tread on a snake and slip back to the start of things, where the press and MPs lay in wait to curse the Home Office for incompetence.

‘Geraldine, when do I get my sit-down with the new Lord Chief Justice?’

‘Lord Waugh’s office say he’s been chock-a-block but I’ll chase,’ said Geraldine, scribbling.

‘Now this one’, said Sedgley, ‘is at Special Appeals and you should know it’s looking … problematical.’ He passed Blaylock a set of papers marked
Bazelli v Secretary of State for the Home Department
. ‘Mr Bazelli is a Bosnian who came to the UK with his father twenty years ago.’

‘Fleeing the war?’

‘Indeed. He got indefinite leave to remain, since when his adult life has been a stream of convictions – theft, assault, handling stolen goods. After four years in Scrubs he was meant to go back to Sarajevo; however … in the patented manner, before going down he impregnated his then-girlfriend and the child was born while he was inside.’

‘So he’s claiming “right to family life”?’ This expression never
failed to cause a clenching sensation in Blaylock’s core.

‘Yup. The child’s British so, clearly, has a right to carry on being schooled here. And to have a father, even one so very derelict as Mr Bazelli. The first tribunal took our side, the second took theirs, tomorrow it’s back at the Special Court.’

‘Well, that’s a drag but hardly a novelty, right?’

‘Not on paper. However, on this go-round he’s being represented by a proper heavyweight human rights silk. Namely, your ex-wife.’

The news struck Blaylock in the manner of an uppercut from close range, but he did his best to act like he could still see straight.

‘I thought she’d not done this line of work in a while?’ Sedgley continued. ‘Busier fighting foreign tyrants in Strasbourg than defending exclusions? Do you have any idea why this now?’

Blaylock felt the silk’s courtroom gaze now turned upon him. ‘No. It makes for an odd situation but … what can we do but put our paws up? It’ll be a little story for the papers, win or lose.’

‘Quite. I just wanted you to be aware.’

Blaylock saw Deborah Kerner and Mark Tallis were at his door. He made his apologies to Sedgley and headed with the spads toward the urgent meeting of the team preparing the Identity Documents Bill – for which, he knew, he needed to have his head screwed on and facing forward – and yet pulsing through his head all the way was one obdurate note:
Why has Jennie picked this fight?

‘Sorry, say again, Deb?’

‘I said you should look to give ’em the silent treatment for this one. Be cool, let them do all the talking ’til they trip themselves up.’

‘Okay. I’m cool.’

Deborah looked sceptical. ‘Sure you are. Just so you know, I can hear you cursing under your breath.’

As it transpired, Blaylock found that a brooding silence came naturally to him as he sat inking pyramids on a page while colleagues
whose names he persistently forgot – the lead legal advisor, the bill drafter, the communications bod, the note-taker – took their seats. His attention was reserved for the bill’s ‘delivery manager’, Graham Petrie – a big-bodied, perfectly bald, softly spoken fellow whose manners belied a steeliness of will – and on Phyllida Cox, whose support in this matter he did not count upon. As the last chair was scraped under the desk Blaylock looked up.

‘Right. Graham. Where the hell have we got to?’

So began the reporting back: the counsel of despair. ‘
The costings remain, frankly, on the side of hair-raising … The guarantees we need for the security of people’s personal data remain elusive … Communities still haven’t signed off on our using their computer system … It’s hard to see past these anomalies we have over our travel treaties with the Irish Republic
…’

Blaylock looked to Deborah and saw that she was struggling to heed her own advice, full of fret and straining at the bit to query the evidence. When Petrie was done Blaylock frowned at him.

‘Graham – why don’t you tell me something new? Counsel needs to get drafting this bill. The timeline is clear: a year from today anyone who wants a driver’s licence or a passport gets an ID card. I know the issues, I understand other departments want tweaks. We need to write it up and crack on. The trouble is I listen to you all and I almost detect the sound of your – trying to talk me out of this? Like it’s too much bother?’

Blaylock saw that he had now obtained all of the silence he could have wished for, and he leaned in.

‘Understand, the die is cast – we will do this. Yes, we will make contingencies. No set of costings can be called cast-iron – they will change. But that cost is to be weighed against what we gain, fighting fraud, crime, illegal immigration. We may be sure Parliament in its wisdom will find the right amendments to keep us within EU law and satisfy the guardians of our ancient liberties, all of that. But we’re not here to debate principles. Just to resolve
technical issues. Now, does anyone in this room not get this? If not then speak now, speak freely.’

Graham Petrie looked from face to face around the table, then at Blaylock. ‘Minister, this is a bill where … I feel we have to be wary of haste to implement the policy unless it is absolutely adequately worked out. I don’t say this one
can’t
work—’

‘Of course not. If you said that then I’d have to throw you out of the room.’ Belatedly Blaylock ventured a smile –
Joke!
– but too late, for Graham had not taken it lightly.

‘I happen to believe, Minister, that we are obliged to be honest about gaps or logical wrinkles in a policy. Also, to weigh the time and effort it will take to craft this bill, as against the risk of public suspicion of it, the potential for major budget overruns
and
for judicial rejection.’

‘Graham, all I see is a weird unwillingness round this table to put forward a set of clauses in order to be tested. I repeat, it will cost what it will cost. Data security will be the best we can make it.’

‘Minister, are you so confident our “best” will satisfy the concerns of the public about what the state will do with their data—’

‘Graham …’ – Blaylock shook his head – ‘you talk about the state like it’s a villain in a movie. The state is
us
. We, the people’s servants. Legitimate by contract, with the right to command. And we’re not such an awful bunch, are we?’

The room stayed silent, no one visibly impressed by Blaylock’s oratory. He wondered if he had confused Hobbes and Locke – or Rawls? – to the distaste of all these First and Upper Second PPE graduates.

Finally Mark Tallis raised a hand. ‘David, just thinking aloud here but – might it be a help if we just, well, called the cards something else?’

Turning to his spad with an expression of intrigue, as if to encourage him to continue, Blaylock was suppressing a laugh.

‘“Identity cards,”’ said Tallis, as if turning the words in the air for the first time. ‘Okay, I can see why people might think it’s got a Stasi feel to it. But what’s the card really for? Just a simple way to say you’ve the right to be here, and you’re entitled to work here and claim services here. Why not call them “rights cards”?’

‘That’s a thought, Mark. Or “freedom cards”. Or “citizen cards”.’

Deborah winced. ‘“Entitlement cards” isn’t totally terrible.’

But Blaylock could read from the room that it was time to end the sideshow of he and his spads versus the rest. Graham Petrie looked affronted. ‘I don’t see how cosmetic alterations will pre-empt the parts of this bill that are going to be politically unacceptable.’