The Knives

by Richard T. Kelly

  ‘Cora, it’s alright, love.’ In Jennie’s voice Blaylock heard far too much assumption of command. Cora looked a little too long before turning and fleeing back down the stairs.

  Blaylock put a hand to his temple, mortally offended, a sense of entitlement beginning to burn there. ‘Okay, I want to see Molly.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s the time, David. I can see it on your face.’

  ‘Don’t fucking talk to me like that, how do you dare?’

  ‘Please, David, just … why not take yourself out of here for now and let’s meet tomorrow and talk then – I promise, we can reason this through.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ll do that then, now I want to see Molly.’

  And he was off, moving down the stairs two at a time, feeling himself a force moving forward, parting the air in his wake. He ducked a head into Gilchrist’s double reception, noting a cherry-red guitar on a stand, laden bookcases, some heavy gilded trophies over a fireplace – and his son looking up at him warily from a velvet sofa where he had been engaged in conversation with some professorial adult.

  As he powered on through the kitchen the eyes upon him were warier still and people stepped aside, some not quite as swiftly as was best for them – he was barging a path, but he didn’t care, being so much the unbidden guest, the unsightly beast off its leash. He wrenched aside the sliding glass door and saw, past the red coals of a cast-iron kettle barbecue, Molly and Gilchrist together in close conference out on the darkened lawn – Gilchrist down on his haunches, Molly grave and nodding silently.

  Blaylock bore down upon them, trying to shift his features into a smile. But when Gilchrist, noting his approach, stood and stepped aside, Molly could not have looked more forlorn.

  Blaylock stood before her, irritably aware that he was breathing heavily, and thrust out his unwrapped gift in its bag.

  ‘Hey, my darling, Happy Birthday.’

  Molly’s face crumpled utterly, she lowered her head and ran past him toward the house. Spinning to look after her, Blaylock felt a paining bewilderment that, within an instant, felt vertiginous. When he recovered his head he could see Gilchrist staring at him with what looked very much like pity, and felt his last restraints snap.

  ‘Proud of yourself, are you?’

  ‘Listen, David, all I can—’

  Blaylock advanced – Gilchrist anticipating enough to raise a hand – and threw a right hook through the defence, hitting his enemy awkwardly in the mouth, feeling his knuckles graze on teeth. Gilchrist reeled and crashed down heavily against the kettle barbecue, which toppled and spilled out its coals onto the grass by Gilchrist where he fell.

  There was a frozen moment of shock, broken by Gilchrist’s heavy cries of pain, then people were coming at Blaylock from the lights of the house. Feeling himself deranged he grabbed a wooden garden chair and hurled it aside such that it crashed against a trellis.

  And then he saw Jennie running toward him, flanked by dauntless men, and he was being surrounded and grabbed at, Jennie shrieking and stabbing a finger into his face before darting to the side of the fallen Gilchrist. For a moment he was still, consumed by the towering grotesqueness of the events he had caused, then a hand fell heavily upon him and he slapped it away, whereupon he truly found himself being seized and held fast at all sides.

  More people were coming, Gilchrist was being helped to his feet, having restraint urged upon him, too, for Blaylock at last read true matching animosity in the man’s eyes. The air was thick with cries. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘He’s thumped Nick!’ ‘Someone get the police!’ ‘I’ve called them!’

  ‘Yeah, go fetch the fucking police,’ Blaylock snarled. ‘They’re right outside.’ It was then that he saw Andy Grieve coming through the glass door, his appalled face a clear sign of the sky having fallen.

  *

  By the time beat officers arrived to the scene, Blaylock had been penned to one corner of the garden by Andy and his Met protection team, who told him it was for his own good, whose eyes told Blaylock this was irretrievable. The beat officers’ hurried consultations with guests were audible to Blaylock above the hubbub, as was Gilchrist’s fiercely muttered ‘I’m okay, the bastard didn’t hurt me.’

  Blaylock watched the officers listen, nod and nod again, then confer. Then one approached him. ‘Sir, I’m arresting you on suspicion of assault and battery. You do not have to say anything. However, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned—’

  Blaylock shrugged off a second officer’s custodial arm.

  ‘Sir, if we need to restrain you we will.’

  ‘You’ll not put your hands on me, son.’

  ‘I should remind you, sir, not to make this any worse for yourself, you’re on camera.’

  Blind to this point, Blaylock now saw the lipstick-size cameras affixed to the officers’ lapels. The sudden sense of his own mindlessness was nearly enough to make his jaw drop.

  ‘Yeah, you got it now,’ said the arresting officer. ‘Not such a big boy after all, eh?’

  ‘What did you say to me?’ Blaylock bridled, and this time it was Andy who took him by the shoulders, evidently wishing to forestall further disaster. Blaylock inhaled deeply of the cold night air and looked up to the black glass of the starless sky. His furies had been and gone, and he was left now to survey his own startling vandalism, the axe he had taken to his own trunk, the livid senselessness with which he had whacked and hacked and managed, at last, to fell himself.

  Shamed Blaylock quits after assault charge follows brawl By Jane Grey, Post Online

  PUBLISHED: 02:34, December 29 | UPDATED: 07:48, December 29

  Disgraced David Blaylock yesterday resigned his office as Home Secretary, after being charged with assaulting the partner of his ex-wife in a much publicised brawl on December 27. A tumultuous ministerial career, never far from controversy, has ended amid the turmoil of an altercation with officers of the Metropolitan Police, a body with whom Blaylock often had tense relations.

  Forty-seven-year-old Blaylock, the MP for Teesside South and a former British Army captain, tendered his resignation to the Prime Minister with an apology for his behaviour, saying that this had ‘fallen lamentably below what is expected of a Minister, MP or, indeed, any responsible and self-respecting individual’.

  In his letter to Patrick Vaughan Blaylock further wrote that it was ‘with great regret, also shame and remorse’ that he left office, and thanked the Prime Minister for having ‘very often had cause to rely on and be thankful for [his] support and loyalty’.

  Blaylock pledged, however, to carry on as an MP. In his letter he referred to having taken soundings in his Teesside constituency, and promised to ‘focus now on better serving the people who elected me’.

  By the end of the day Downing Street had confirmed that Paul Payne, the well-regarded Minister of State for Security at the Home Office, would replace Blaylock as Home Secretary, a recognition of Payne’s talents that also saves the Prime Minister the difficulties of a wider reshuffle.

  At Hammersmith Magistrates Court yesterday morning Blaylock admitted the charge of attacking documentary filmmaker Nick Gilchrist during a private party at Mr Gilchrist’s west London home attended by Blaylock’s ex-wife, human rights barrister Jennifer Kirkbride QC, and the three children from their ten-year marriage. Blaylock was granted bail and told to return for sentence in three weeks’ time, where he may be liable to a fine and a community service order, on top of a possible order to compensate Mr Gilchrist. Blaylock admitted before the court that he had ‘a number of personal issues to address’. It is reported that he recently underwent a course of ‘anger management’ treatment at a private Hampstead clinic …

  EPILOGUE

  Early light was seeping into the hallway through the transom window as Blaylock laced up his running shoes and sought to flex his obdurate calf muscles. Bent double like so, his eyes met the letter on his console table that he had been ignoring all week. Get it over with, he now thought, ripping open the env
elope.

  Dear Mr Blaylock

  You will not mind my writing, I hope. Naturally I read about the comeuppance you suffered, and it did make me think, having the history with you that I do and knowing a thing or two about reverses of fortune. I would like you to know you have my sympathy, honestly. God knows we are all human, we all have our weaknesses, we all fail sometimes. I only hope you have learned something from your experience, by which you will profit, since that is what God wants.

  If it is of help I would say I have taken a lot of encouragement from the words of Saint Francis of Sales, who says, ‘Our dear imperfections that force us to acknowledge our deficiencies give us practice in humility.’

  Yours sincerely,

  Diane Cleeve

  Blaylock had begun to be irked by Mrs Cleeve’s periodic postal admonishments, and yet he couldn’t but feel she was entitled. If he ever sat down to respond one day, he would have a good deal to tell her.

  He had to grant her, moreover, that Jennie had told him very much the same in one of their few conversations unmediated by a lawyer prior to her departure for Los Angeles. ‘You’ve put quite a curse on the venture, David. But you’ve hurt yourself most of all. I’m sorry for you, but maybe this is what you needed.’ If he believed himself wrongly accused to some extent, certain charges stuck nonetheless. Jennie judged him correctly in many ways – he could hardly deny the evidence.

  He went out to his doorstep where Andy Grieve awaited him, already limbered up and taking the air. Together they jogged out into the bleary south London street. It was a chill late February morning but the skies were pleasingly blue, and to Blaylock’s view there was a measure of promise in that.

  He had not assumed that Andy’s assignment would survive his resignation – that close protection would still be offered him as a humble backbencher. ‘Just the assumption you’ll have a guard could be effective,’ Caroline Tennant told him at first, scarily frugal as ever. But in the end she had come through, signing off Adam Villiers’s risk assessment that advised extreme caution in the case of such a visible and recently threatened ex-Home Secretary. For his own part Blaylock was quietly grateful that Andy had volunteered to remain in the post.

  Now they pounded onward, shoulder to shoulder, past the Peabody Estate, Toni’s Caff and the Georgian white stucco. Blaylock cast barely a glance at the newspaper bins outside Dev’s corner shop: the great affairs of state were no longer his bailiwick. That the Identity Documents Bill was now being throttled in the Lords was Paul Payne’s concern, if concern his successor truly felt. The government would absorb the blow and move on – such was Patrick Vaughan’s way, perennially grateful that Her Majesty’s Opposition caused him a lot less bother than Their Lordships. The Payne Home Office retained hardly a trace of Blaylock’s tenure, Mark Tallis having departed for a lobbying job, Deborah Kerner now prominent in a briskly right-wing think-tank, though Gavin Blount soldiered on thanklessly. If Blaylock missed anyone, it was Geraldine Bell, who had taught him that manners were not nothing but, rather, quite possibly the only thing.

  Blaylock wondered, still, if politics were enough to sustain him now. His demotion was a manageable thing: he still knew how to make himself useful in the House, and didn’t care greatly that colleagues considered him a diminished figure. Jim Orchard, possibly more upset by his fall than anyone, still took pleasure in ribbing him about his newly modest place on ‘the roll of the public servants of England, hur-hur’. There was a degree of freedom in being out of office; yet he was newly shackled by his penitent pledge to serve his Teesside constituents, leaving him to ponder just how far he should sacrifice his judgement to the sorts of opinions he heard in the Arndale Shopping Centre every other Saturday.

  What he took to be the angel on his shoulder told him he was better to focus awhile on being a good listener, to cultivate a modest notion of himself. By any reckoning his judgements had been profoundly flawed for far too long – he believed he had clung to fruitless desires that had been mere symbols, that promised no actual part of the desired thing in itself. What he had thought to be Jennie’s gradual softening toward him, for instance, he felt he had ruinously misread. It would have been better had she been tougher on him, since no good deed went unpunished and all that.

  The first and obvious objective of his penance was to see his family again, in circumstances free as far as possible from recrimination. A visit to Los Angeles at Easter did not seem so implausible, if he continued to conduct himself inoffensively.

  Humility was hard to him, though – a tough middle path that you could only keep hewing, given how much you had to bite off, how tight you had to muzzle yourself. He felt older atavistic instincts always worryingly close at hand. And yet the cost of his rages was abundantly clear to him. He had long known, by bitter experience, that life didn’t always give a second chance. The one life’s all we have, Jennie had said, needlessly, and yet he managed so well and often to forget. He accepted now that he would just have to find a different way of living, effect a slow business of repair in the time that he had. But he had resumed weekly sessions with Amanda Scott-Stokes, and what was that, he told himself, if not humility?

  He and Andy ran on into Kennington Park, taking their dependable daily route down a long straight asphalt path between muddy grass and stooping denuded magnolias.

  It had become their custom to finish the run on a headlong sprint back to Blaylock’s front door. Today, though, Blaylock had a notion to get ahead of schedule. The way forward looked to him like a decent hundred-yard dash, in the distance a row of green benches hemming the path, a man sitting pensively on the furthest of these seeming to propose a sort of finish-line.

  And so he took off at a sprint, planting his feet firmly, driving forward cleanly. Andy was a tad slow to see the sport of it, by which time Blaylock had opened a lead, and was feeling all the good vital signs in place – the thump of his heart, heat in his face, his calf muscles taking the strain.

  As he pelted to the finish, the man on the bench got to his feet and Blaylock felt sudden irritation, since he seemed to saunter obstructively toward the middle of the path. You stay in your lane, kidder.

  It was yards away that he fully clocked the taqiyah on the man’s head, the tunic under his long leather coat, the luxurious red beard. And in that instant he suddenly recognised a properly unforgettable face from the recent regrettable past – Finn, the maladjusted young man from Sadaqat’s centre in Stapletree – Finn who now pulled a kitchen knife from within his coat and – as Blaylock belatedly sought to feint aside – rammed into him and brought him down onto the asphalt path.

  Blaylock was pinned under considerable weight, and as he fought back he felt the knife plunging into his side, then withdrawn and plunged again – savage, invasive thrusts that caused him blinding pain.

  ‘You see me, eh? See me now?’ Finn barked.

  Blaylock groped and thumped hopelessly, trapped in this awful embrace – and then Andy was yanking away Finn’s striking arm, stamping on the hand, dragging the attacker off and aside. Blaylock tried to sit up only to slump back onto the path, faint-headed. It was from supine that he heard the thumping report of Andy’s Glock pistol, once, twice, rhymed by cries of pain.

  He felt sick and dizzy. Don’t panic, he thought, and put his hand to his wound tremulously. But what he felt there was truly a tear, a great gape in his left side, and when he lifted his fingers shakily in front of his eyes he saw they were appallingly bloody.

  A dreadful intelligence suffused him, and he felt fear. Andy, he could hear, was on his phone. ‘Ambulance!’

  He was conscious of shouts and footfalls coming from afar. Andy was suddenly crouched by his side, frantic.

  ‘David, you’ll make it, you’ll make it. They’re coming …’

  But now he found himself fighting for breath: there was an unbearable constriction behind his ribs. Andy was touching his face, he could feel his friend’s breath there. But nothing was so vivid to him as the stone-cold of the pat
h underneath him, seeping through him, consuming all his conscious thoughts while his shocked higher functions seemed to recede.

  ‘They’re coming, David. Just hold on …’

  He was losing his grip, something within was saying Begone! His head lolled back and he stared upward. The morning sky was a rippling blue veil, vast and unbelievable, filling his vision. Now it seemed to be descending, falling onto him, and in his mind he was racing to meet it.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In researching this novel I had the benefit of a number of conversations with MPs and civil servants both current and former, as well as individuals who have done time in various capacities within the Home Office and in Downing Street. These conversations were conducted under the Chatham House Rule, and were of immeasurable value to me in conceiving this fiction. It need hardly be said that I alone am responsible for the fanciful use I made of all the information, reminiscences and reflections that I gleaned.

  Debts that must be acknowledged by name are to the transcripts of the proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and to Major Vaughan Kent-Payne’s excellent memoir Bosnia Warriors (Robert Hale Ltd, 1998) – in particular Major Kent-Payne’s accounts of the Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Yorkshire’s dealings with mujahedin and with the siege of Guča-Gora, incidents which inspired the account of my fictional David Blaylock’s military service in Bosnia.

  At Faber I am indebted as ever to my editor Lee Brackstone, the man who knows how and why; also to Kate McQuaid, Luke Bird and Kate Ward; to Tamsin Shelton and Hamish Ironside for first-rate copy-editing and proofreading; at Aitken Alexander to Andrew Kidd and Matthew Hamilton, both of whom helped the book to get made; at Casarotto Ramsay to Christine Glover; and to my darling wife Rachel, with love and gratitude as always.