The Knives

by Richard T. Kelly

  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.

  His eye was drawn to a rash of red ink: ‘Number Ten will query!!!’

  The offending line was ‘Play for the team, and if you think you can lead the team then give that a go and see what you’re made of.’

  He was pondering whether the sentiment could be salvaged when his phone vibrated. On the line was the former Jennie Blaylock. He stabbed the answer button.

  ‘Hi, David. Listen, the kids saw all about your fracas this morning on the news – your citizen’s arrest? They’re hoping you’re okay?’

  ‘Oh aye, you should see the other fella, et cetera.’

  ‘I’m sure you did what you had to. It’d be a shame if you got your block knocked off by some little car thief, after all the trouble you’ve seen …’ Jennie’s lilting Durham tones implied, as ever, that she had seen it all herself.

  ‘Well, I’m relieved you approve.’

  ‘Molly’s here, she wants a word before bed.’

  ‘Great, put her on.’

  ‘Hi Daddy!’

  After a cheering exchange of endearments he heard Jennie retake the handset and felt there was no point messing around.

  ‘So you’re chasing me through the courts again tomorrow.’

  ‘The Bazelli case? You know how it is, I’d told chambers I was available for a bit and that was just the bus that came along.’

  ‘What, with your seniority you couldn’t have ducked it?’

  ‘Well, let’s also say, I don’t see that I should have to? Am I supposed to renounce my living, David, just because you’ve got yours? We’ve been through all this, haven’t we?’

  ‘Yeah, we have. I just keep thinking one day you’ll see reason.’

  She laughed down the line in the throaty manner he had always adored and which felt, in the circumstances, almost worth the grief.

  ‘Okay, look, I don’t want a row.’

  ‘That’s good. Because I wanted to ask a favour, actually.’

  ‘You fucking what?’ he said, feeling his mood improve further.

  ‘Can you come pick up the kids an hour earlier this Sunday? There’s just an errand I have to run.’

  ‘You can’t get Radka to call in for an hour?’

  ‘Oh David, you know full well …’

  He had known his folly even as he uttered it – a needless show of unwillingness on his part, when he only had the children every other Sunday and half of the school holidays; compounded by his perennial forgetting that Jennie’s young Croatian nanny would never do anything but the very least she had signed up for.

  ‘Okay, we can get a milkshake or something before the cinema. Have they picked a film to see?’

  ‘I think there’s some sort of documentary about nocturnal animals Molly’s keen on? Cora’s amenable, being a nocturnal creature herself.’

  ‘But what about Alex?’

  ‘He’ll suffer it. Okay, yes, bedtime. Listen, thanks David, goodnight.’

  Putting down his phone Blaylock felt, as usual with Jennie, that he had been bested somehow. He chastened himself for having responded with such little grace to what was, really, the offer of an extra hour with his children. The visitation terms he had accepted were not generous, and yet the truth – though he wished it otherwise – was that he didn’t always claim his entitlement in full.

  A crystal decanter and glasses – an old wedding present – sat atop a low shelf next to Blaylock’s desk. He went and lifted the decanter, then caught himself, set it down and walked away. Then he walked back, poured out three fingers of single malt and swallowed his medicine – lavender, heather, Virginia tobacco and a hint of engine oil. His eyes watering agreeably, he poured again. He had first met his future bride at the University of Durham. Even years later he could never quite confess that he carried always in his mind the first time he saw her – early one morning in the college canteen, the radio playing ‘Sweet Jane’, she in candy-stripe pyjama bottoms and some lucky beggar’s cabled sweater, smoking, laughing throatily, running hands through her hair. His heart was near enough set on her then, before he had any inkling of her finer qualities.

  Jennie came from Barnard Castle, ten miles whence he hailed himself, and yet something between them made for a gulf. Both reading history, they met weekly in a tutorial room, where they tended to disagree about the causes and effects of near enough everything from the Peasants’ Revolt to the Sykes–Picot Agreement. They were both ever ready to speak out, she always with composure, he sometimes hotly incoherent. She was as assured as he was recessive, to the Left as he was Right.

  The first in his family to reach a university, Blaylock had hated the idea that higher education was any kind of refuge from the ‘real’ world. But that was, more or less, how he felt about the left-wingers he ran across in student politics. Their crusading sureties vexed him: most issues seemed to him murkier than that. Though the Conservative Association seemed to him a crowd of braying snobs, such was his faith in the individual over the collective that he signed up – something that Jennie observed with mirth in their weekly jousts.

  Come their final year he had gleaned what Jennie had in mind for her immediate future: to travel, write, observe elections. She had met a guy who seemed as bothered as her by global imbalances of power, and their closeness looked to Blaylock like a stronger connection than any he had enjoyed with the handful of girls whom he had dated listlessly and failed to treat very well.

  Feeling increasingly unmanned by his unrequited love, Blaylock found a seed growing in his mind. There was another man lurking inside him whom he needed to meet – to invite, even, to the forefront of his person. He convinced himself he could achieve the great change by self-mortification, by shifting himself into harm’s way, a challenge that didn’t scare him as it might, for he saw himself as having only so much to lose as matters stood. At a careers fair he sat down with the man from the British Army. On paper he had promise. A bursary was available.
He travelled to a Wiltshire army base, donned a numbered bib, scaled walls and scribbled his way through mental aptitude tests. A letter came to inform him he had Category One consent to start at the Royal Military Academy after his degree was done.

  The last time he saw Jennie before their graduation she materialised before him from out of the throng on Saddlergate, for once without her boyfriend at her side but going the opposite way on a thoroughly drizzly late June day.

  ‘Seriously, David? The army? Oh my lord. Why?’

  He had been so resolved and yet suddenly he was back in the seminar room, struggling to sound coherent. She spared him.

  ‘Look, I really hope you’ll do all what you say. Really, David. Take care of yourself, okay?’

  His fellow cadets at Sandhurst came to consider him a monkish figure – ‘a stiff-necked sort of a prick’ in one hostile view. He quickly understood that to be in the army and yet seemingly indifferent to the quest of screwing anything in knickers was to put oneself in the line of a particular kind of fire. But one by one the others’ long-distance relationships had failed the further they travelled from the civilian world. Blaylock, though, stayed true to the girl he had left behind – or who had, rather, left him standing in the rain. However mad his scheme of self-overcoming had seemed, it had been made on a wager he would meet Jennie again and things would be different. And the plan had worked, on the surface. Yet there had been, in its origins, a fatal flaw.

  *

  In his bedroom Blaylock flicked on the television to catch Newsnight and found a panel in keen debate over a filmed package they had evidently all just watched on the subject of ‘Britain’s Secret World’. The filmmaker, Nick Gilchrist by name, was in full flow, describing a ‘surveillance state’ into which Britain had sleepwalked, and calling on the UK’s secret service – if Blaylock heard this right – to appoint human rights campaigners in key roles overseeing its operations. A big, lantern-jawed, expressive man with a luxuriant mane of greying hair, Mr Gilchrist struck Blaylock as the sort who oughtn’t to be so paranoid.

  Blaylock stripped off his clothes and repaired to the bathroom. There he felt the gaze of his reflection – his double – in the long mirrored cabinet, and he turned and gazed back.

  Nowadays he didn’t much care for the look of himself. The muscled gauntness he’d acquired in the army was long gone. His brow and jaw arguably retained some ‘character’, but with jowly traces of gloom that seemed to him the manifestation of some creeping, unreliable element in his personality. Likewise, the tremble of flab round his waist seemed to spell a succumbing to the earth and its earthiness that felt to Blaylock unmanly – as, weirdly, did the sag of his undercarriage, formerly a good virile weight, increasingly in his eyes a disused, rather mournful oddment. Idly he rapped his penis with his knuckles – a gee-up gesture of sorts – and it swayed, a glum pendulum.

  He shut off the light, settled under the covers, and had not lain long before he felt the usual hard sheet of discomfort behind his shoulder blades. He turned and turned again, massaging himself, but the ache resisted manipulation or any effort to ‘lie flat’. Gradually, though, he felt his weight sinking across the mattress, breaths steadily coming shorter, his fatigue rolling over him like the tide over shingle.

  He was rudely awakened by his phone and knew straight away that it was the early hours, darkness still heavy behind the blinds as he scrabbled about to locate the slim pulsing oblong on his bedside table.

  ‘Hello?’

  His ear was stung by a blast of incoherent babble. He looked at the screen ID – UNKNOWN – then pressed phone to ear again. The babble was breaking into parts: he could make out wailing sirens, stray shouts, street noise, a war-zone ambience of mayhem and panic.

  ‘Hello? Who is this?’

  Out of silence he was answered by a voice that was female, albeit a robot’s monotone. ‘Do you hear that, Mr Secretary? It is – terror. It is – your future. It is – going to happen. Mr Secretary.’

  Blaylock sat up, kicking the cover off his bed. The voice in his ear became high, sinister in its purity, a choirboy reading from the Bible.

  ‘And when it happens, you will have to ask yourself – what did I do to prevent it?’

  ‘Listen, whoever you are, you’re making a big mistake.’

  The voice changed again – so thickly sepulchral it could have issued from a crypt. ‘Proud of yourself? Big man? You should be ashamed. You should die of shame. This country is run by vermin and you’re the biggest rat of them all. The trap is set. Look out!’

  Blaylock moved for the door, hearing an approach outside.

  ‘Your time is up.’

  The last thing Blaylock heard coming down the line was the mad clamour of an alarm clock, then Terry was rapping at his door.

  *

  The kitchen clock read 03.17 as Blaylock brewed a pot of tea for Terry and his police team plus the new arrival, a trim and shaven-headed detective from Scotland Yard Counter-Terrorism who introduced himself, in politely estuarine tones, as Detective Neil Hill.

  ‘May I have a look at your phone, sir?’

  Blaylock passed over his battered BlackBerry, feeling a similar sheepishness as when his son cast a jaundiced eye over the ageing device.

  ‘Am I going to have to lose that?’

  ‘No, sir, what I’m thinking is we’ll install a bit of software on it that tracks and records calls? Obviously we’ll get what we can from the original call. But the payday will be if they call back.’

  Blaylock nodded, having long been vaguely of the assumption that his phone was already tapped. ‘Okay. Fine.’

  ‘You feel alright, sir? Not too spooked?’

  ‘Oh yeah, sure. It’d take more than that.’

  ‘We’ll get the handset back to you before the morning’s out, sir. We just have to sort out the surveillance authorisation.’

  ‘You mean I’ll have to sign a warrant on myself?’

  The officer nodded, clearly seeing neither harm nor humour in this simple procedure. Blaylock tipped his tea into the sink, thanked Detective Hill for his efficiency, bid goodnight to his minders and trudged back upstairs in search of sleep.

  FROM: HOME OFFICE AND THE RT HON DAVID BLAYLOCK MP

  HOME SECRETARY’S SPEECH TO ASSOCIATION OF CHIEF POLICE OFFICERS

  Original script, check against delivery

  I know that change is painful. This government does not seek change for its own sake. When economies are forced on us I accept these will be unpopular. I don’t want a confrontation with police, only a conversation. And be assured, I hear you.

  But I cannot simply heed your wishes. My budget is not quite nine billion pounds. Policing receives nearly half that. In recent years police numbers reached record levels, but those levels were just not affordable to the public purse. They have had to come down, and they will have to come down further.

  Despite that, I am – yes – asking the police to achieve more. But let’s try to meet that challenge, together. Even in straitened times, with intelligence and purpose and fresh thinking, we can cut crime.

  It can done by better teamwork, co-thinking and partnership across forces and regions.

  It can be done by better technology. You need the right tools for the job, and on this I back you to the hilt.

  It can be done by initiative. My commitment to ‘restorative justice’ has given officers the power to use their own judgement over minor offences – to give swifter satisfaction to victims of those crimes. Any good police officer wants to take the lead that way.

  And leadership, above all, is how the thing can be done. I’m asking you, the leaders, to lead change. Part of that is appreciating how money gets spent; maybe you see this more clearly than the rank and file. But you will make the big decisions, based on the consent of the people, whom you serve, just as this government serves. We know what needs doing, and our duty is to do it – not to complain or dissent. So let’s none of us try to hide behind whatever office we hold. It can be do
ne.

  PART II

  1

  ‘Easy now, you’ll not hit an unarmed man?’

  Philip Nixon, the lean and silvery Scot who was Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabularies, grinned from behind palms raised in mock surrender as he climbed into the backseat of the Jaguar.

  ‘Howay.’ Blaylock waved the leg-pull aside. ‘I’ve not got it in me this morning.’

  Nixon gave Blaylock a sharper look from under his critical Caledonian brow. ‘You look beat, right enough. Did you not sleep?’

  Blaylock shook his head, wishing to leave it at that. From the front seat Andy glanced back to ensure Nixon was buckling in, then gave Martin the signal to pull off and begin the journey up the M1.

  In truth Blaylock felt his etiolated mood to be less a result of the abusive caller and the broken night’s sleep than the content of a 6 a.m. phone chat with Patrick Vaughan about the procedure of taking his Identity Documents Bill through ‘pre-legislative scrutiny’. The Captain, sounding horribly unimpressed, had instructed him to get things under way in tones that left Blaylock sure he would be paddling this canoe alone.

  ‘So,’ said Nixon, ‘you’ve got your story straight for the day?’

  Blaylock nodded. ‘Plain words. It’s not like we mean anything so drastic, is it? As we well know, if I was such a hatchet-man I’d be cutting the number of constabularies in half.’

  ‘Aye, and you’d have twenty unemployed Chief Constables after your blood.’

  ‘Quite. For now I’ve got enough enemies. Speaking of which, I’ve got a quick meeting with Bannerman once we get there.’

  In his past life Nixon had been a blue-chip accountant specialising in privatisations, foreclosures and associated redundancies. As such Blaylock found him an easygoing ear on the subject of difficult choices. However, as he now studied the broad blue backs of his police-issued driver and bodyguard, Blaylock was reminded to curb his language.