The Knives (7 page)

Blaylock heard Deborah in his head.
Be cool
. ‘What’s your solution, then, Graham?’

‘In my view? It’s not too late to park this bus and look afresh at how to make simpler provisions that will serve us perfectly well – say, if we just made it compulsory for all adults to hold a passport? Most people have got them already. They feel comfortable with them. The application and issuing processes we already have are rigorous. I took the liberty of preparing a paper …’

Graham thumped a bound document of near-cuboid proportions onto the table. Half of the room seemed to lean toward it as if suppressing admiring coos.

Phyllida Cox wore her driest smile. ‘Well, you did invite the table to speak freely, Home Secretary.’

Blaylock could feel his temples thrumming with blood. ‘You’re right. I asked for it. I underestimated the mood in this room. I get it now, obviously – it’s a sort of boring, low-level, let’s-just-kick-this-one-into-the-long-grass obstruction—’

‘Minister, that’s—’

‘I’m talking now, Graham. Get this straight, you all need, collectively, to get out of that mindset and get yourselves on a war
footing. Get focused on delivering this policy, on doing what’s expected of you. The mission is not refurbishing passports – that’s not what this government promised or what we have committed to do. That is a national biometric identity card, whatever the bloody hell we call it.’

His pen clenched in his fist, he thumped the desk, conscious of speaking through gritted teeth.

‘Next time we meet, and that had better be sharpish, I don’t want to be having some bloody college debate, I want to be reviewing a draft bill ready for parliamentary counsel. Now, do you lot think you can manage that?’

Phyllida’s eyes were full of an alarm that Blaylock had wholly wished for. ‘Home Secretary, you know everyone in this department performs in a professional—’

‘Yeah, “perform” is the word, it’s all “Let’s pretend” and no action,
that’s
what I’m weary of,
that’s
what I’m saying—’

Blaylock felt – the room heard – his pen crack. He looked at the broken bits in his palm and felt all eyes, which had looked away during his tirade, now upon him. He tossed the debris at the wastepaper basket in the corner of the room, and missed. Then he stood.

‘David,’ said Phyllida urgently, ‘let’s reconsider—’

‘Naw, let’s pack it in. Eh? Let’s all get out of here and see if we can’t make ourselves useful.’

People were still sitting, still staring at him somewhat. Finally they stood and shuffled out in silence. They would be talking soon enough, Blaylock knew that much.

Blaylock paced to and fro across the tiles of the Level Three men’s room, end to end, until he was sure his teeth were no longer on edge, his hands no longer curling reflexively into fists. All the while he was mentally replaying his conduct in the meeting. He believed he had expressed himself correctly, that his concerns had
been appropriate. And yet the anger in him still flared like an affliction. For a second time he stooped to the sink and spattered his face with cold water.

Still he could feel it in his chest – that old familiar, heedless urge, pressing him to the brink of an act he knew to be ill-fated, even as he pushed ahead and did that thing which, on sober contemplation, he surely ought not to have done. This urge he called the urge of What Should Be, and he was borne along by it regardless of a quieter voice that struggled to plead caution. He shuddered at how he managed, over and over, to carry on as if ‘rightness’ itself could suffice in the teeth of a storm of wrong outcomes. And yet, simultaneously, some part of him shrank from the true reckoning of what this mindset might have cost him, again and again throughout his life. In his head now, unbidden, was a veritable photo album of times he had reduced his children to tears and taken some black satisfaction in it.

He straightened from the sink, breathed deeply, met his reflection in the glass and was repulsed by the grim furrow of his brow, the small red veins in the whites of his eyes.

For the remainder of the day Blaylock sequestered himself behind a closed office door, annotating a draft of his party conference speech with red ink. Soon it was past 6 p.m., for Geraldine knocked, entered and began diligently to pack up his ministerial red box with layers of colour-coded folders, correspondence for review and signature, briefs for diary meetings, a big night’s homework.

Blaylock stood, stretched, went to the threshold and gazed around Level Three. Still uniformly lit, it now had a deserted aspect, cleaners’ black bin bags dumped outside many a door.

‘Mr Blaylock, sir! So sorry for your team!’

Fusi, a rotund and jocund Nigerian security guard, was ambling down the corridor. Blaylock joined him in cheery chat about the
weekend’s defeat suffered by Middlesbrough FC, whom Blaylock affected to support for constituency purposes – though Fusi, having fastened onto this fact, believed him a diehard fan. Thus they mulled further over the prospects of Joey Folari, a Nigerian lad on loan to Boro from Chelsea, the team Fusi had adopted keenly since arriving in the UK from Lagos, having learned his trade passing inspection mirrors under cars at the gated entrances to hotel compounds. Blaylock observed that Joey had yet to get a first-team game; Fusi believed the lad would be homesick, struggling to get a decent bowl of
ogusi
soup on Teesside; Blaylock did not doubt the scale of the problem.

As they talked, Blaylock’s spads slipped past them into his office and Geraldine, coat on, went the opposite way with a mouthed ‘Goodnight’. At last Blaylock stepped back inside, to see Ben at the meeting table reading a hefty document, and Deborah hunched over Blaylock’s laptop, the glow of the inbox across her fretting features as she performed her routine recompense for Blaylock’s inattention to email by logging in to his account and clearing his backlog. Mark had switched on the usually dormant TV screen fixed to the wall and BBC News 24 played to no one as he paced about while talking to his phone. ‘Obviously, don’t write that, just know I’ve said it, okay? Yup.’

Blaylock surveyed his charges with affection. ‘While most head home for supper, here we burn the lights late like
Il Duce
on the Piazza Venezia …’ The spads eyed him curiously. He shrugged. ‘Okay, at ease.’

As they sat together at the oval table Mark pushed the evening paper toward Blaylock. ‘You made the front of the
Standard
.’

He inspected. ‘THE HAVE-A-GO HOME SEC’ was the headline illustrated with a shot from the morning’s scrum outside the building.

Deborah was eyeing the pages of his red-inked conference speech on the table. ‘You ready for a fresh pair of eyes on that?’

‘Not yet. I’m still working on the bits meant to be from the heart.’

‘Hey, I can do heart.’

But Blaylock wished to crack on. ‘Listen, about the ID cards team meeting, did I come over like a mental case?’

‘No, David.’ Mark winced. ‘You were great. It’s not the worst idea to come on like a loose cannon once in a while. For one thing people might start to live in fear they’ll get shot.’

‘Some of them you really do need to get shot of,’ remarked Deborah, moodily. ‘What did Cox say to you afterwards?’

‘I think Phyllida and I are non-speakers for the moment.’

‘Well, it’s her system you’re attacking. All these schlumps need to understand that if you can’t deliver then you don’t just get a hug and a nice change of job.’

Deborah was forever calling people out on failures to ‘deliver’: ‘delivery’ was perhaps her only concern. While liking her stridency Blaylock felt it lacked the needful finesse – the talent for backstage palm-greasing – by which politics routinely got done. And yet her dream of a stiff-broom sweep through the building didn’t displease him. He allowed himself the occasional fantasy of what he might accomplish with a permanent secretary he could call an ally, a proper tactical commander.
Let’s get this done, chop-chop, no buggering about
.

Ben Cotesworth was looking pensive. ‘I don’t reckon it’s the worst thing for our processes if we just take a moment to consider whether the nay-sayers have a point.’

Blaylock had to respect Ben’s pluck, even as his other two lieutenants threw him hard looks. ‘You mean Graham Petrie’s idea? Passports for everyone instead of ID cards?’

Ben gestured to the fat document in front of him. ‘He did ask me very politely to have a read of this.’

Blaylock scoffed. ‘Polite of him to have typed up that bloody telephone directory instead of working on my bloody bill.’

‘No, no.’ Deborah sounded galled, now twisting her silk scarf between her hands as if fashioning a garrotte. ‘He just pulled that out of the drawer it’s been sitting in since the last time they stopped a Home Secretary doing ID cards. He put a new fucking
date
on the cover …’

Blaylock shifted in his chair, wanting to unseat the block of frustration inside him. ‘Ben, I got us pregnant with this bill, it was done for love, and we’re just going to have to carry it to term whatever the bairn looks like. The point is that the schedule’s slipping, the Captain’s hearing voices that say jack it in.’

‘But if the Prime Minister isn’t right behind it—’

Tallis jumped in. ‘Number Ten gets the principle of the bill, they just get jumpy at the complaints. But if we make it work, they’ll love the results. Our trouble is this idea that we’re going to mess it up. That’s what the media says, and that’s who Vaughan listens to. We need to work on the press. If I get someone tame to interview you, you’d do it?’

‘What am I meant to say, though?’ Blaylock shook his head and silence reigned for some moments, in which Blaylock realised that Ben was very diligently tapping the bridge of his nose with his forefinger.

‘I think I know what this bill needs,’ he offered at last.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘We need to invite the Home Affairs Committee to do a full interrogation of the draft, get all its enemies in to give evidence, the civil liberties groups and tech firms and what have you – the works.’

Blaylock had the sudden surreal sense of entertaining at his table some strange angel who had assumed Ben’s approximate shape. ‘Are you having a laugh, Ben? You want Gervaise Hawley’s committee to chew the bill up clause by clause? Do you
want
us to lose?’

Tallis, though, was looking as pensive as Ben. ‘No, hold on. He’s
a clever boy. People think we’re not listening. Let’s show how much we listen, let’s have the debate, make it clear how serious we are. So our critics have to show how serious they are, too. Then we’ll find out what’s a real concern and what’s just sanctimony. I mean, come on, David, if it’s a proper debate don’t you think we’ll win it? Whatever Hawley says, that committee will get pregnant with the bill, too. Sure, they’ll have recommendations, we’ll make a big show of appearing to take those on-board, yadda yadda. Meanwhile I bet a few things happen in the real world that make our case for us …’

Blaylock wondered what sort of horror Mark had in mind. Inwardly, the troubling incompleteness of the thing had begun to haunt him. He had a firm-to-middling conviction on identity cards. Yet in his heart he knew there were other shades to the story, consequences unforeseen or unforeseeable. The world changed while he slept, then he woke and lumbered onward into a new dawn with ‘the policy’ designed to address yesterday’s problems. There was a bottle of red wine on the office sideboard and he was suddenly thirsty to crack it.

‘Okay,’ he said finally. ‘If nothing else then Ben’s idea will get the draft bill written faster, by god. I’ll get on to Francis Vernon, get the committee scheduled.’

Deborah appeared disapproving. ‘Gervaise Hawley’s just going to complain his committee’s being forced into an unreasonable timeframe.’

‘Oh, but’, Tallis tutted, ‘in his arrogance Gervaise won’t be able to pass up his big chance to kill the bill. Then we put David on the witness stand and, boom, David fucking kills Hawley.’

Surtout, pas trop de zèle
, thought Blaylock as he raised his palms as if in benediction. ‘Enough. Mark, will you draft something for Francis?’

Mark darted to Blaylock’s desk and set to typing out an email. Blaylock wanted to dismiss the others for the night, and yet they
sat there seemingly expectant of further overtime.

‘Deb, will you have a last look at the cops speech? And Ben, would you have a read of my conference draft? It’s got the hymn-sheet stuff. Needs a bit of the salt of the earth, but.’

Blaylock stood, uncapped the bottle of wine that had sat there like a challenge, and offered it around. Mark and Ben shrugged why-nots and he splashed out glasses for them. Deborah, eyes fixed on the page, gave her customary curt head-shake.

‘I hope your day finished up better than how it got started, boss …’

Blaylock was distracted at last by Andy Grieve, dependably upright and so rarely deterred. But from his slumped place in the back of the Jag, he continued to brood on the view from Vauxhall Bridge under sodium light.

Martin dropped him by his doorstep, whereupon he and Andy shook hands for the night. Within, Terry the night-shift guard was already in situ downstairs, seated with a crime novel in an armchair by the kettle in the kitchen.

In his first floor study Blaylock cracked the red box to find a great sheaf of EU papers requiring his tick of approval. He didn’t bother to scrutinise them, faithfully checking the boxes then settling down over Ben’s emendations to his conference speech.

‘As Home Secretary it is my duty to always carry in mind the safety of the British public. It’s the first thing I think of each morning I wake, and the last whenever I turn in.’

This felt laid on too thick, if it had the benefit of being half-true. Blaylock did bear such worries daily – images of the shadow-world, the terror plot, the lone wolf in the crowd clad in the suicide vest, the car edging through traffic with a lethal payload. His first waking thought, though, was always to remember who he was. Come night-time he was more concerned by his growing agglomeration of aches and pains.