‘I trust you’re not saying it takes two to tango?’ said Anna Mann.
Blaylock was bothered. ‘No, what I mean is that we understand these offences are committed within a climate of fear, often masked from the authorities. I would put it to you, though, that things have changed, that police are better trained.’
‘In my view there’s just a culture of misogyny embedded in the police,’ Anna Mann shot back. ‘No amount of self-regulation will shift that. It’s not even just them; I personally can’t see an end to domestic violence until we end sexism in society.’
Blaylock suddenly found himself aspiring to the patriarch’s tones of Lord Waugh. ‘Well, be that as it may, tell me, what is it that you want to have happen?’
Gail Hurd leaned in. ‘We think what’s needed is an independent judge-led public inquiry.’
Blaylock groaned inside. ‘I see. With what kind of a remit?’
‘To hold the police and the CPS to account, look at what social services and health services have to deal with, take evidence from families, victims, stakeholders like ourselves …’
‘What do you hope that’ll accomplish?’
‘Well, the issue will get the national prominence it deserves.’
‘There’s something else, from my point of view, can I just say …?’
Mrs Marjorie Michaels, silent until now, had spoken. Blaylock shifted to face her. She was small and hunched in her black jacket and skirt, her facial features oddly reminiscent of a pubescent male, her complexion worryingly red as if from a persistent medical condition or the drugs needed to treat it.
‘I know money is such a thing,’ she continued haltingly. ‘It’s money often as not that keeps women from leaving a situation. But having somewhere to go and call home, just for a bit … Someone there who understands, who’ll listen, who knows how to talk to kiddies who are scared? I think it makes such a difference.’
‘You’re talking about refuges?’ said Blaylock.
‘Yeah, oh yeah … They’re golden, I think. Golden. If you could do any one thing that’s what I wish you’d do. More of those? Or just save the ones they got. I know what Anna means, the trouble with men … But I don’t know how you train ’em out of it, if you can. I don’t know how you change someone who’s that bad. And I do take your point, what the police do, they’re not far off what you’d want. But sometimes … a woman just needs to leave, straight away, or she and her kids, I mean … they could die, Mr Blaylock. They could die.’
Blaylock, having made sure to meet Mrs Michaels’s eye, now felt himself swallow uncomfortably hard. ‘Yes, refuges, qualified staff, they do require significant resources … But I do note your comments, Mrs Michaels, I do, and I ask you to leave this with me.’
*
Phyllida Cox had made no contribution to the meeting but once the delegation had reached the lifts she made for the door, turned back to Blaylock, and said, ‘Can we speak before you head north? There are a number of things.’
‘Of course.’
‘You okay with that?’ asked Deborah when Phyllida was gone. ‘You’re really going to try and do something for refuges?’
‘Oh, I can’t afford it. Caroline would kill me. It’s just …’ He gestured helplessly to the air, as if to some cosmic dimension of the problem.
Geraldine was at the door. ‘James Bannerman on the line for you.’
*
‘Good afternoon, David. To advise you, the march that the Free Briton Brigade planned for east London – we can’t let it go ahead, usual rules, section thirteen of the Public Order Act. I’ll be saying the right to protest is countervailed by the threat of public disorder, also by our wish to protect local communities and premises.’
‘Great,’ said Blaylock, absently. ‘Shall I get a legal opinion here, to be safe?’
‘Why bother? I would say in all candour, the intelligence on this outfit now seems a little more concerning than I first thought. Over and above the usual concern for damage. Frankly I don’t want them gathering anywhere.’
Blaylock was puzzled by Bannerman’s unusually ominous tone but, before he could press, the Chief rang off.
*
Kept waiting outside Phyllida’s closed door he loitered like a minion in the seated area, gazing at the portrait gallery nailed up in an orderly succession round the walls – the Home Office boneyard, the honour roll of his predecessors, a poisoned chalice passed from Liverpool to Peel, Wellington to Walpole, Palmerston to Churchill.
‘Do you have a favourite?’
He turned to see that Phyllida had materialised in her doorway.
‘I realise I never asked you before.’
‘Aw, they’re all so different. Except that they all left, in the end. I just hope there’ll be a nail up there for me when my time comes.’
They stepped into her office, distinguished by the building’s best collection of aspidistras and by Sir Robert Peel’s antique clock atop her bookcase, its gilded aspect seeming to belong to a different building. She took her place behind her desk with what seemed to Blaylock a distracted air.
‘Thank you for the draft of your conference speech.’
‘How did you find it?’
‘What you say about immigration figures, you’re quite sure you want all this business of “The buck stops with me”?’
‘I’d feel anything else would be dishonest.’
‘It’s just a hostage to fortune. One never knows …’
‘When I started here, Phyllida, you warned me never to set any store by my plans. Because things would just happen, the last item on the agenda would suddenly be at the top?’
‘Yes. That is the job. We will always be fire-fighting.’
‘Yeah. And yet, I find I can’t live like that.’
Surprised that he offered nothing more, she looked down to her notes. ‘You remain so confident about identity cards?’
‘“It can be done, and it will be done. Beyond any possibility of doubt.” What matters is the atmosphere in which we work. In which we fight. I need you to see that it permeates the building.’
‘Clearly the policy continues to face huge practical difficulties. Were Number Ten fully aware how big it would be?’
‘Maybe not, and you and I may see it differently, but still we are mandated to enact the policy, and you need to be helping me deliver it. I feel I’m still hearing unnecessary notes.’
‘David, I am not just some cheerleader. In policy matters I believe I can be a useful counterweight. So I would like you to at least hear me out. Ms Kerner seems to have your ear perpetually, and I must say I question the wisdom of some of what she’s pouring in there.’
‘I hired Deborah for her strong voice, and I find it bracing.’
‘David, I’ve seen a fair few special advisors in my time. The ones with the loudest voices, strangely, are always the ones least adept at crafting workable policy. She stomps about firing memos when it’s not her damn job to manage people or direct operations.’
‘Nor is that what I hired her for. And yet at times I’ve been left wondering how else I’m meant to get things done.’
‘People in this building work long, stressful days—’
Blaylock snapped. ‘Sure, yeah, I see plenty of worry on faces – worrying about their own backsides, and how they get out of being blamed for some shambles they watched happening. What I want to see is people firing all their guns to do what I bloody well asked them to do. My private office are here late every night, long after the bloody directors have gone for their tea—’
‘Please, please, David …’
He stopped. Phyllida’s face had creased so badly he thought she was in pain. When she spoke again she was quiet.
‘Please, not another of your – eruptions.’
‘My what, sorry?’
‘When the black clouds cross your face, when you start to bash things … We’ve worked together long enough for me to see it coming. I’m sorry, this is a delicate matter but I have felt the n
eed to raise it, for … quite some time. It’s not a position I want to be in, as a woman … But I urge you to please be calmer. People hear you round this building. They hear you and they … they think the worst.’
Blaylock had struggled to come to terms with her harrowed tone, but now something admonishing in her face made something inside him push back. ‘Phyllida, with respect, if I’m not satisfied with work, with attitude – I want people to know about it. And if I give someone a very minor shellacking I don’t expect them to curl up and cry about it. Jesus, you’d think—’
She stood up, not even looking at him. ‘Forgive me. I was mistaken to try to raise this.’
‘Hey, look, I am more than happy to discuss it.’
‘David – I see no point.’
6
Gazing at the darkening window of the First Class carriage Blaylock felt a familiar sensation of racing in transit between rival kingdoms – up from Wessex through Mercia to the welcoming borders of Northumbria. Andy sat opposite him, his police team as a foursome behind. Before him was as much paperwork as he’d felt he could face on the journey. His red box was travelling separately, solo, in the back of Martin’s Jag and would await him under police protection at Darlington.
He stared down, eyes swimming somewhat, at the now substantially red-inked pages of his draft conference speech.
‘For the most part the electorate are hard-working people who want to live in a society that is tough-minded but fair, where you get out what you put in, and people can be what they want to be if they play by the rules …’
He had written that, true enough; and yet the thought of saying it aloud was beyond risible. He put a clean red line across the page and asked Andy if he fancied fetching them each a can of McEwan’s Export.
*
From Darlington Martin drove to Blaylock’s constituency office, sited amid a drab concrete-and-wire-mesh business park part-funded by the European Union. Finding himself famished, and it being Friday, he phoned ahead to the office and enquired if anyone would care for a fish supper fetched in. Though he found no takers, Blaylock nonetheless hopped from the Jag outside Val’s Caff just before the turn into the park.
He was next in line as Val spooned virulent-looking chicken tikka onto a jaundiced potato before dressing the sides of the polystyrene box with limp lettuce leaves. Her customer, though, was crestfallen.
‘Aw, ya put salad in? Aw, didn’t want that. Tek it out, yeh?’
Blaylock felt a crushing fondness for the customs of his tribe.
He strode into the lamp-lit park, noting a new VACANT lot, a call centre that had evidently ceased fielding calls. But shutters that had been long drawn down in one sullen corner of the forecourt were now raised to reveal an ad for a small engineering firm, which cheered Blaylock immensely. If all jobs were equal, he felt, some were more equal than others.
In the office the team was assembled, blinds drawn down over the cheerless view, fluorescent lights blinking over the cramped space. Blaylock shared his bag of chips with the table.
In the chair, preparing a digest of the weekly postbag, was Bob Cropper, Blaylock’s veteran election agent, past master of minding the office expenses, fielding intemperate callers to the office and gauging local opinion by putting a wetted finger in the air. At Bob’s side was Margaret Whitton, special case worker, delegated to any constituent who presented with a couple of quid or less in their pocket on which to subsist for a week. Holly Robson, office manager, sat with the ring-bound notebook. Jim Fisher, constituency party treasurer, looked as if he’d rather be in the pub. Placed beside Blaylock was Chloe Herron, a quiet, pretty sixth-former in a smart coat, on work experience and visibly still getting the hang of office routines.
‘People have written in quite dispiriting numbers’, Bob Cropper tutted, ‘to ask if there’ll be a Free Briton Brigade candidate at the next election. They leafleted here this week, actually spent some money.’
Bob passed Blaylock a full-colour flyer in bold shades of red, white and blue, replete with portraits of apparently ordinary people looking with wounded eyes into the lens. On the back was an unflattering snapshot of Blaylock himself, caught as if just told his flies were undone.
100s of Asylum Seekers SWAMP our towns, waiting for our courts to throw them out. HIS government pays our council to put them up for FREE!
Thinking this crude stuff, Blaylock nonetheless felt fleeting panic as he tried to imagine how he would spell out what was so vitally different about his own political view.
The FBB are the TRUE voice of YOUR streets that David Blaylock PRETENDS to come from! We want YOU to stand up and speak for YOUR community too!
‘Yeah, well,’ Blaylock offered, ‘if they ever hold a pen for long enough to write some proper policy we might have to pay attention.’
‘What’s the bet they stand a candidate here next time?’
‘You worried, Bob? Is it time for me to go hunting a nice safe seat in North Yorkshire?’
Familiar chuckles rippled round the table, yet Blaylock thought he saw worry in certain tired eyes. Margaret, seeming even wearier than usual, rallied nonetheless. ‘There are thirty-six thousand households in this constituency, we know them all and we’ve directly helped out twenty-two thousand of them. So if the ungrateful buggers want to …’ She could not bring herself to the dispiriting conclusion. Bob reasserted his role in the chair.
‘Well, turning to the green ink brigade …’
Every week there were loners who wrote in strangled prose with blasts of hyperbole. But Blaylock never took them lightly. In his days of ‘How to Be an MP’ inductions he and fellow newbies had been urged by a junior whip to attend to every scrap of constituency correspondence. ‘Always, always read to the end, even if the whole first side is about what a cunt you are. Because if you don’t turn the page there’s always a chance the second side will begin, “And just because of you I’m going to kill my wife and kids.”’
‘Someone put a bit of graft into this. I don’t know how you want to take it, David.’ The vintage look of the thing nearly made Blaylock smile, the message spelt out by a cut-out collage of newspaper capitals.
BLAYLOCK – 30 DAYS TO MEND YOUR WAYS OR ELSE!!!
‘Andy.’ Blaylock beckoned Grieve from his guardsman’s post by the door. ‘Does this constitute a threat?’
Andy came across and peered down. ‘In the current market I’d call it a low bidder, boss.’
*
Driven a few darkened miles back to his constituency home in Maryburn Blaylock observed the nightlife as he glided through town, amused still by the cut of the youngsters just starting their northeast Friday night out – packs of likely lads strutting along in smart shirts, gaggles of girls tottering toward minicabs, amusedly about the business of trying to stop their stretchy skirts from riding up.
At home he took a shower and made the mistake of looking at himself in the mirror. To be here was a blessed removal from his Westminster routine. But the Maryburn house seemed to embody, and not happily, the life for which he had traded his marriage. With five bedrooms, garden and garage, it had been a snip when bought seven years before. The state-installed videophone and panic room had doubtless added to its value. It had been bought, however, not as a mere constituency perch but as a proper weekend residence for a family that, as things turned out, had hardly set foot in the place.
Jennie had been pregnant with Molly when Blaylock was first sounded out about contesting Teesside South. Possibly, when she agreed to let him have a go, she envisaged him failing. But the closer he edged to the breakthrough, the more the schism between them widened. It seemed to Blaylock they had overcome so much to be together that it was crazy to come apart for so little. But political differences, for so long the source of spirited, principled disagreements, now assumed gigantic proportions. Jennie made a number of negotiated appearances at his side on the stump, with Alex and Cora. But he knew with sickened surety that she would not accept the part. Six weeks after he won
the seat, Jennie served notice that she and the children would not be shifting from Islington. The manner in which he reacted to the news only made clearer to her that things would be better if he left.
There was another dimension to the tale, he knew – Jennie’s narrative of his thuggish temper, on top of his brute self-absorption. It was undoubtedly the case that during the campaign – when he was supposed to be minding Cora and instead had his mobile pressed to his ear discussing with Bob Cropper the way Ottersdale Ward might be tending – Cora had stepped precipitously off a curb, been glanced by a passing car and suffered a broken leg. That was a headstone-like marker in their decline. He had never left the doghouse after that.
*
‘You’re the MP, yeh?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Okay. Hadn’t a clue who you were before th’ day.’
His first Saturday surgery appointment was with Mr William (‘It’s Billy, yeh?’) Darrow, a taxi driver from Port Clarence – and really, actually, a forklift driver, but then there wasn’t the building work there used to be. Sat before Blaylock with his beefy forearms formidably on the table between them, Billy was so pronounced in his unhappiness that Andy – always uneasy in the hurly-burly of Arndale Shopping Centre – was visibly attentive.
Billy, though, was subdued. He was already in dispute with his ex-partner, and now he was losing his socially rented flat, with a spare room he had kept for visits from their daughter, because it was judged too big for his needs.
‘I don’t think of myself as a victim, right? But, fact is, I am a victim. It’s all been tek off us. What’s left for me, eh? I’m just – it’s like I’m going down and I dunno what to grab onto.’
Blaylock valued this constituency business and yet it could feel like a dismal turning of a wheel, a sack of distress one might suffocate in. If people were getting the benefits they were entitled to, there was little else he could tell them. But he promised Billy Darrow his office would assist with an appeal against the ending of his tenancy.
The Knives Page 14
