‘It doesn’t seem to me a laughing matter.’
‘Nor to me, but as you know, Home Secretary, the way you do your sums is something I find hard to take seriously. So, in answer to your question, on our current resources, no, we will not be able to make a great difference in the matter of domestic violence. I understand if the politics of that are … problematic for you?’
Seeing that further exchanges would be fruitless Blaylock went inside, just in time to hear Patrick Vaughan address the gathering.
‘This evening is always, for me, a powerful reminder of the purpose and valour that police officers bring to their job, protecting the public, often risking their lives in order to save lives. We could not ask for more. The Home Secretary does his bit, but I know he would admit that his best efforts are only a drop in a bucket …’
Blaylock knew the room had zero savour for this line of humour. Even as he winced he caught sight, through the navy-uniformed throng, of Abigail Hassall mingling among press at the rear of the room. They exchanged cordial nods.
Vaughan called on Blaylock to distribute trophies to a procession of constables who had braved house fires or deep waters, or persuaded the vulnerable away from high ledges, or confronted armed men despite having no weapon of their own. While posing for photos he had his hand gripped rather crushingly by one officer who held a vodka-tonic in the other hand, his diminutive wife at his side. This man did not let go, and though the noise in the room was not excessive he addressed his remarks close to Blaylock’s earlobe, as if he might bite it.
‘It’s nice to get shown a bit of respect. Frankly I don’t feel we get it from you, Mr Blaylock. That affects how we’re treated on the street, is my view. Because of your attitude.’
‘Sorry, you think when I talk about reforming the police I’m encouraging villains to have a go at you? Is that what you mean?’
The officer shrugged. ‘Sorry if the truth hurts.’
‘No need to apologise, I’m a big boy.’
‘You don’t look so big to me.’
Blaylock looked to the wife as if for support, but she wore the avid look of one inclined to urge her husband into a fight rather than out of it. Blaylock took a deep breath, let it go, and walked away.
*
He made it narrowly in time to Jennie’s talk and sneaked in at the back of the busy seminar room, pointedly ignoring the murmurs and prods that his presence occasioned. Once Jennie had squared her papers and crossed from the top table to the lectern he succeeded in catching her eye and she shot him a somewhat pursed look; but he saw amusement there, too, in which he delighted.
He had gathered from a whiteboard display that the topic for the evening would be her long-running work with UNICEF to relieve the maltreatment of children in poverty, efforts that over the years had seen her trekking and fact-finding from Colombia to Ghana to Myanmar. Her text, indeed, turned out to be laden with citations and stats from UN reports – scarcely Jennie at her full-throated best, and the nodding heads of her audience told Blaylock she was preaching to a choir.
Still, as he listened more closely to her asides on journeys made to Adamawa and San José de Apartadó, he could picture her – not in her black uniform and pressed collar but in old jeans and tee-shirt, hacking down rough roads, unwashed and unguarded and putting herself in harm’s way for the good of others. Her dauntlessness, the purpose that made her such a formidable lawyer, the patient cares that shone out of her mothering – they were all there. It occurred to him that had Jennie ever soldiered she might well have made a finer soldier than he. Certainly she had fought her way along a career path, never conceited, never deterred, accepting no masculine bullshit – his own included. In shame he recognised that in the early stressful years of her practice he had never praised her sufficiently for her successes. Within a year of their divorce, however, she had made silk.
When the session wound down he wondered how to interrupt or interpose himself in Jennie’s company. Yet she pressed her way through the mingling bodies directly to him.
‘Hey. Was that okay?’
‘You were great, you’re always great. I’m your biggest fan, right?’
Her smile was wan. ‘I’m just so knackered. In the office at five this morning, then at the High Court giving your mob some stick for breaking air pollution law …’
The familiar sorties, however jaunty, gave Blaylock pause. Jennie leaned in nearer his ear. ‘You’re going to hurt my image with this crowd, you know. I’m supposed to stick around for a glass of cheap wine.’
He pressed his nose to her ear in kind. ‘I couldn’t take you somewhere for a glass of very expensive wine?’
She leaned back, then, to his great surprise, grinned. ‘Go on, then.’
*
They were driven to a boutique hotel in Clerkenwell, where Andy settled on some plush furnishing in the foyer while Blaylock and Jennie took high stools at the bar and drank a mineral Chablis. Their chat came easy and unforced. When he ventured his view of the problems her speech had identified – ‘It’s a matter for the states in question, their lawmakers, their police’ – she gave him as much without fuss. She was indeed tired, and keener to grouse about a pompous colleague in chambers and the inadequacies of Molly’s Year Four teacher. Blaylock sat and focused on being a good listener, though really he was watching her – enjoying the familiar way she pushed her long locks from her face – and thinking about the two of them, savouring this effortless intimacy that was unattended, for once, by their onerous past.
He felt himself giving in a little to old imaginings. Was there anything really so essential in their past differences? Even after all, did anyone know her better than he, and vice versa? Wouldn’t strangers in the bar, seeing them so inclined to one another, take them for a couple?
After Jennie had polished off a second large glass of white wine she busied herself to head off, but with the smile by which Blaylock scored the evening a success. They stood up, and she looked at him intently for a moment. A hug or a peck on the cheek was not out of the question on occasions when they had rubbed along well enough. But Blaylock was dumbstruck when Jennie put her mouth to his, lips slightly apart, then squeezed his arm before turning away, heels clicking as she crossed the foyer and out into the night.
He was left standing at the bar in boy-like wonder. For one thing, he could not deny: the crushing fondness for her he had been feeling had turned in an instant to arousal. That in itself would not have thrown him were it not for the deeper sense of reciprocity he thought he had sensed between them. Fanciful or not, his head was so filled with the urge to be with her that it seemed, briefly, to spin. He had to breathe deep, pull himself together, so as to step out, face Andy, get going.
2
Blaylock’s morning preparations for Home Office Questions in the House had less of the rigour he usually applied to them, for he knew himself to be mired still in misty reflection over Jennie. They were disturbed decisively, though, when Geraldine brought in an urgent communiqué from Jason Malahide, complaining about a ‘hostile’ profile just published in the Correspondent. ‘I detect fingerprints on this,’ Malahide wrote, ‘and be advised that I am looking into it.’
Blaylock whistled up Abigail Hassall’s piece and was amused, not least in the imagining of Malahide’s face as he read certain quotes Blaylock had anonymously chipped in to Abigail’s research. Really he felt nothing there was so damning as some of the crazed paeans to the free market – ‘The state oughtn’t to be in the business of housing, or schools, or hospitals’ – that Abigail had dug from Malahide’s press clippings.
He handed the letter back to Geraldine. ‘I’ll see Jason in Cabinet shortly, I’m sure we can heal the breach.’
Geraldine winced. ‘David, Number Ten says the PM actually wants to see you and Malahide together before Cabinet starts.’
*
The Captain – whether by inclination or instruction, but under the glinting eye of Alan Ruthven – subjected Blaylock and Malahid
e to some focused froideur. ‘I’m aware of a certain needle between the two of you. And I think we know well enough these things need to be settled in private, not carried on through the papers. We can’t afford blue-on-blue conflict, understood? It’s a gift to our enemies and it detracts from the work of this government.’
Thinking to fight another day, Blaylock found himself joining in a handshake that doubtless both he and Malahide rated meaningless.
The Cabinet meeting that followed might have been designed to annoy him. First, Simon Webster updated Cabinet on moves by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights to declare the sentence of life imprisonment as an ‘inhuman punishment’ unless the prisoner was allowed the right of review at some advanced stage of incarceration. Webster wore a ring of moral assurance over his raised eyebrows as he trashed the Grand Chamber’s proposal. ‘It is arguably the most objectionable thing we’ve heard from Strasbourg in some time. We trust our Court of Appeal will see sense, and Lord Waugh and his colleagues will take a stand.’
Patrick Vaughan weighed in with a matching belief in his own rightness. ‘Yes, we’re talking a small number of cases, brutal murderers in the main, who – we are all clear – our courts should be able to send to jail for the rest of their lives. There are provisions for exceptional release on licence if the Home Secretary saw compassionate grounds but, well, we know the Home Secretary is no bleeding heart.’
Blaylock, feeling he was being watched, chipped in. ‘I will be seeing Diane Cleeve of Remember the Victims before I next go to Brussels – obviously our position has no more prominent supporter than Mrs Cleeve.’
The room nodded in unison. Chas Finlayson’s ‘national service’ white paper was then consigned to the bin, with what seemed to Blaylock a needless aside from Education Secretary Snee Gupta about the folly ‘of teaching young people to march when they should be out learning trades’. Belinda Ryder then spoke out against a memo Blaylock had circulated about a proposed ban of segregated meetings at student unions, worrying in her best broadcast voice that she feared ‘the precedent of government intervening on campuses’. Minded to rejoinder sharply, Blaylock was relieved that the Captain got in first to declare the matter was, basically, none of Belinda’s business.
But he had not heard the worst until Communities Minister Valerie Laing brought to the table a briefing for the local government finance settlement, and indicated that her department’s contribution to police funding would be reduced further.
Blaylock gestured across the table, incredulous. ‘Sorry, but be aware, the police will say that’s going to put basic services at risk, and I wouldn’t blame them. I’ve cut their core grant to the bone.’
If Valerie Laing had fancied a fistfight she did not get the opportunity, for Caroline Tennant sailed into the exchange with a look of high disquiet. ‘David, where the police are concerned I thought you had nailed up your reforming colours? Because it’s strange to see you now begging exceptions. We all have to match deed to word; there is no point talking tough about a balanced budget then coming back with the begging bowl.’
Blaylock had an urge to lift the candlestick holder by his place setting and hurl it at the wall. Instead he took the measure of a room in which no one was on his side and, seething, swallowed the admonition. He was still quietly beside himself as he half-listened to Vaughan’s closing remarks, urging his ministers to ‘get out and about around the country on regional visits, spreading the government’s message’.
‘Obviously’, Blaylock uttered through his teeth, ‘any of you are welcome to join me for a tour of the northeast’s heavy industries.’
‘Quite,’ said Vaughan. ‘Business Secretary, you ought to get up there, I should think. David, you’ll host? Cabinet Secretary, will you please minute to that effect so we get their offices talking?’
It had amounted, Blaylock had to admit, to an even-handed rebuke. The Captain’s version of leadership went straight down the middle, in that regard as in so much else.
*
At 2.30 p.m. Blaylock got to his feet and approached the Commons despatch box. ‘Mr Speaker, I am pleased to report the Lord Chief Justice’s affirmation of the proper functioning of our extradition arrangements with the United States, and I can confirm that last night Vinayak Khan left for the US on a plane from RAF Mildenhall.’
He drank in the first noisy ‘Hear, hear!’ But there was no time for complacency as the Member for Hackney and Shoreditch rose to speak in favour of the Post’s campaign for action on domestic violence. ‘Will he not act to ensure vulnerable victims get the treatment they deserve?’
Blaylock had been warned by Deborah to treat this question with maximum muted gravity. ‘I thank the Honourable Member. I believe a taboo is being broken down in the sense that women are coming forward to report offences. We must agree to view the figures differently.’
And then Blaylock’s shadow stepped forward – Martin Pallister, blue-eyed and blue-suited, one middle-aged man who evidently devoted serious time to combing his hair. Pallister was an unalloyed northerner, with a northern accent and a northern way of narrowing his eyes to express scorn.
‘As identity cards, another of the Home Secretary’s hopeless causes, go before the scrutiny of House Committee – will he please tell us if he seriously expects to convince the House and indeed the wider public that we will all be safer if, for whatever we wish to do, we have to first show our papers to anyone who claims the right to ask?’
Blaylock surged to the box, checking himself not to start speaking before he would be properly heard. Then, composed, he fixed his opposite number with a gaze and arranged his face as if to say that his perplexity and incredulity were growing by the second.
‘The Right Honourable Member for North Tyneside is going to feel the benefit of these cards soon enough when he’s claiming his benefits and pension entitlements …’
Blaylock forgave himself this, since the benches behind him were so loudly delighted by such a gratuitous dig at a former golden boy.
‘And, much as it pains me to say …’ – he closed his folder and leaned on it so as to suggest this bit was from the heart – ‘… I am disinclined to do knockabout stuff on important issues of national security and crime prevention, issues that I know were, once upon a time, taken just as seriously by the posturing fraud opposite.’
There was uproar, as Blaylock had expected: the loudest shouts, of course, from the benches opposite. Once the Speaker had restored order he was stern. ‘I must call on the Home Secretary to withdraw the word “fraud”. It is, as he knows very well, unparliamentary language.’
‘Mr Speaker, I do withdraw it. The Right Honourable Gentleman, I know, used to agree with me on this matter until relatively recently. I accept that nowadays, for whatever reason, he finds he cannot.’
Soon the safe Tory questions were on stream, the reassuring drear flow of MPs referencing their constituencies in pursuit of positive local media coverage, asking Blaylock to commend their local police force and falling crime figures, which Blaylock did most happily. With the first flurries done he ceded the floor for a while to his ministers, Dalton, Walters and Payne, who were generally keen for a share of the limelight, if not necessarily for the more thankless queries.
Martin Pallister, though, was not done. ‘Will the Secretary of State say what is the number of foreign national offenders currently at large in Britain whom the Home Office ought to have deported but have not?’
Blaylock considered the handling of his folder a major issue of personal style. He liked it slim, such that it was clear he needed no crammer; and in dealing with Pallister he endeavoured never even to look at it.
‘We do not have current figures, but we will have them next time once the Independent Inspector has reported. I will be happy to advise him then. It is certainly the case that we inherited a broken deportation system from the party opposite, and the fight to repair it is a daily burden. I would be glad only of his support in that endeavour, and perhaps
a little contrition.’
Blaylock retook his seat conscious that he would have been wiser to cut his answer in half. He would need the Independent Inspector to have thrown him a bone before the ‘next time’.
3
It was 9.01 a.m. and Roger Quarmby’s long-awaited draft report sat squarely before every place setting of the Immigration Team. Some attendees were flapping through pages as if hunting for scraps of consolation. But the numbers seemed to numb understanding. Blaylock’s copy lay open at the summarising bullet points, all perfectly grim. Phyllida Cox was watching him, he knew, for one of his eruptions. The report was, near enough, an unmitigated disaster.
Quarmby had served it up cold, not least with a straight answer to Martin Pallister’s perennial query about the number of foreign national offenders at large in the UK: roughly 1,500, it appeared, a steep rise over two years, some of them off the radar, including a dozen convicted murderers and a dozen rapists. Blaylock had no clue how he might explain away those figures to Diane Cleeve, much less his Labour shadow. But then the dangerous individuals were only a sliver of the wider group of illegals – refused asylum seekers, visa over-stayers, those on the run to evade removal or eking out appeals – whom Mr Quarmby estimated to number in all ‘anywhere between 400,000 and 800,000’.
At last Blaylock spoke, his voice hoarse from the prolonged silence. ‘Does anyone here think this is remotely acceptable?’
Eric Manning let out a trapped, pained exhalation. ‘Clearly, the report is bad. But it could be worse.’
‘Eric, look, what is this “Lost Register” he’s talking about, people who’ve just vanished?’
‘It’s not that hard for people to go missing.’
The Knives Page 20
