The Knives
Page 1
For C.M.
‘I must do my work in my own way,’ declared the Chief Inspector. ‘When it comes to that I would deal with the devil himself, and take the consequences. There are things not fit for everybody to know.’
JOSEPH CONRAD, The Secret Agent
There’s a story I used to tell years ago where I’d say, if I were a revolutionary leader, and they came up to me and they said, ‘We’ve got a dilemma, we don’t know whether to execute these five men or cut down these five trees’, I’d say, ‘Well, let me look at them.’
NORMAN MAILER
‘Over Westminster Bridge and past the House of Commons,’ he said exultantly. ‘Into Whitehall and up the steps of the Home Office. Right into the fortress of reaction.’
NORMAN COLLINS, London Belongs to Me
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Note to the Reader
Dramatis Personae
Prologue
Part I
1
2
3
4
Part II
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Part III
1
Part IV
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Part V
1
2
3
4
5
6
Part VI
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Part VII
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
NOTE TO THE READER
This is a work of fiction, though it reflects some matters of public interest in the time when it was written. The UK government that it depicts is imaginary, and both the legislative framework and the political calendar within which that government conducts its business are not those of the UK, past or present – or, at least, not in every respect. Moreover, the geography of Westminster, and of many other places, has been re-imagined (the real Home Office is not found on ‘Shovell Street’, there is no such parliamentary constituency as ‘Teesside South’, nor towns near the Tees named Maryburn and Thornfield, et cetera). In other words, while I have borrowed things recognisable from life in the aid of plausibility, this story remains, of course, make-believe.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
David Blaylock MP – The Home Secretary
And in alphabetical order
Caleb Aldrich – US Government’s Director of Counter-Terror
Sir James Bannerman – Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police
Geraldine Bell – David Blaylock’s private secretary at the Home Office
Alex Blaylock – seventeen-year-old son of David Blaylock
Cora Blaylock – thirteen-year-old daughter of David Blaylock
Molly Blaylock – nine-year-old daughter of David Blaylock
Diane Cleeve – founder of charity Remember the Victims
Richard Colls – Chief Constable of Kent Police
Ben Cotesworth – special advisor (‘spad’) to David Blaylock
Dame Phyllida Cox – Permanent Secretary (chief civil servant) at the Home Office
Bob Cropper – ‘chief of staff’ for David Blaylock in his Teesside constituency
Norman Dalton MP – Junior Minister for Policing at the Home Office
Chas Finlayson MP – Government Minister for Employment
Nick Gilchrist – documentary filmmaker
Andy Grieve – close protection bodyguard to David Blaylock
Snee Gupta MP – Government Minister for Education
Sheikh Hanifa – Government consultant on ‘inter-faith dialogue’
Abigail Hassall – newspaper journalist/political correspondent
Seema Hassanli – Communities officer at the Home Office
Gervaise Hawley MP – Chairman of Home Affairs Select Committee
Neil Hill – Detective in Scotland Yard Counter-Terror division
Rory Inglis – Director of Counter-Extremism Strategy at the Home Office
Nasser Jakhrani – aspirant student doctor, friend of Sadaqat Osman
Martin Keeble – police driver for David Blaylock
Deborah Kerner – special advisor to David Blaylock
Jennifer Kirkbride QC – barrister and ex-wife of David Blaylock
Peter Kitson MP – Government Minister for Health
Valerie Laing MP – Government Minister for Communities
Jason Malahide MP – Government Minister for Business
Eric Manning – Director-General of Immigration at the Home Office
Becky Maynard – press officer at the Home Office
Dominic Moorhouse MP – Government Foreign Secretary
Javed Mukhtar – co-founder of Goresford Islamic Centre, Essex
Philip Nixon – Her Majesty’s Inspector of Police Constabularies
Jim Orchard – Lord Orchard of Sherwood, Conservative life peer
Sadaqat Osman – co-founder of Goresford Islamic Centre, Essex
Martin Pallister MP – Labour Shadow Home Secretary
Trevor Parry MP – Parliamentary Private Secretary to David Blaylock
Paul Payne MP – Junior Minister for Security at the Home Office
Graham Petrie – Home Office civil servant, Immigration
Roger Quarmby – Independent Inspector of Borders & Immigration
Al Ramsay – Downing Street Director of Communications
Madolyn Redpath – policy director of civil liberties group Custodes
Desmond Ricketts a.k.a. Abou Jabirman – Islamist preacher
Susan Rivers MP – Government Minister for Defence
Sir Alan Ruthven – Cabinet Secretary: chief civil servant and advisor to the Prime Minister
Belinda Ryder MP – Government Minister for the Arts
Duncan Scarth – businessman, co-founder of the Free Briton Brigade
Amanda Scott-Stokes – chartered clinical psychologist
Griff Sedgley QC – barrister frequently engaged by the Home Office
Brian Shoulder – Head of Scotland Yard Counter-Terror division
Mark Tallis – special advisor to the Home Secretary
Caroline Tennant MP – Chancellor of the Exchequer
Patrick Vaughan MP – Conservative Party Leader and Prime Minister, known to his Cabinet as ‘the Captain’
Francis Vernon MP – Leader of the House of Commons
Adam Villiers – Director of MI5
Guy Walters MP – Junior Minister for Immigration at the Home Office
Lord Waugh – Lord Chief Justice, head of the judiciary in England
Simon Webster MP – Government Minister for Justice
PROLOGUE
‘Gentlemen, these are your rules of engagement. You’ll carry them printed on a card in your pocket – I’d prefer you keep them etched behind your eyeballs. They are not hard to remember, they could even be of use to you in other places. One, you will at all times show purpose. Two, you have the means to protect yourselves, so use them. Three, do not tolerate aggression – if you are fired upon, return fire. Be that said – four – never give an order that can’t be obeyed. Five, in the u
nlikely event you find yourselves notably outgunned, and a safe route exists to remove yourselves – remove!’
Whitewashed and clean-stamped with call-signs on turrets, the trio of Warriors rumbled in convoy down raw muddy tracks lately carved for their passage through the Lašva Valley. Holding to a steady speed, keeping twenty yards apart, their heavy treads powered over the rough road – thirty-ton weight driving down dirt and loose stones, engines emitting full-throated roars.
From his jostled vantage, chest-high to the turret of Bravo Zero, Captain David Blaylock surveyed the Bosnian countryside. The sullen skies that had met the Yorkshire Regiment in late April were, today, a cool cloudless blue. In the air was the good resin smell of the conifers lining the roads and clustered on the hillsides. The modest villages, the thickets of wan, reviving birches, the hawthorn and the elm – in all, Blaylock felt, it wasn’t so wildly unlike North Yorkshire. Except that hardly a single bird was ever seen or heard. Except for his sharpened sense that round any bend, over any crest, one could come upon something dreadful – foretold by the whistle and boom of mortar fire, or black smoke climbing in a billowing column over trees.
Blaylock had lived with this foreboding since the regiment’s arrival – their first ride into the valley, past ruined houses and hamlets with their mournful air of despoil. He was ready, now, for the sight of ruined bodies – men and women and children. He bore it, uneasily, as a platoon captain’s duty. Twenty-six years old, he commanded twenty-seven men.
A stubby pencil in hand, braced against the Warrior’s motion, Blaylock drew lines on tracing paper nestled into the fold of his logbook, hand-amending the company map of local routes and villages. His convoy was headed for Fazlići, then west to Suhi Dol, his mission to explore and log hitherto uncharted terrain that lay off the rebuilt roads, places that had yet to see a UN presence. Today, then – so Blaylock briefed the boys – was ‘Operation Show-A-Friendly-Face’.
Trev, his gunner, sat beside him in the turret, staunchly in charge of the Rarden cannon and the mounted machine gun. Down below was Cookie, the driver, a study in lip-bitten focus. In the back of the wagon, behind its metal cage, sat Gordy, Jinks and Chappo – keeping watch out of the Warrior’s raised back hatches, trying out their wit above the engine’s din for the benefit of Tamara, their dark-eyed and seemingly biddable Bosnian interpreter.
Up top Blaylock was just glad to be moving, breathing the air, away from the garrison at Stari Vitez – not stuck on guard or escort duty. The garrison, a disused school, was a crowded mud-hole – a Muslim enclave, moreover, within a Croat-held area, such that the sense of siege was palpable. Blaylock had yet to get comfortable with peering out through the mess window to see Bosnian forces in sniper positions, barrels trained on Croat lines half a mile away.
His men, he knew, were even more perplexed by a set-up far removed from what they had seen lately in Belfast. That had been a simple sketch on a chalkboard, Her Majesty’s armed forces against skulking paramilitaries. Bosnia, though, was civil war – a two-way conflict that had recently and strangely split into three. And since they wore blue UN helmets on their heads, the Yorkshire Regiment declared for no particular dog in the fight.
Blaylock’s main piece of leadership before today had been a chore he found hateful: overseeing the safe passage of Muslim refugees – standing idly by, in other words, as miserable parents and dazed children were trooped off trucks and onto coaches for further ‘dispersal’, all their worldly goods in plastic bags, their wary eyes betraying that they had seen bad things and were braced for worse, that their sense of peril was in no way relieved.
And so in this morning’s task Blaylock felt a kind of liberty – there was no radio link to base, the umbilical cord had been thrown a bit wider, the challenge distinctly different.
Bravo Zero chuntered on through a small village of a dozen or so houses. Suddenly a flurry of children, all matted hair and holey pullovers, darted out of an alley between dwellings, waving their arms excitedly. To his left Blaylock saw Trev was digging into his pockets.
‘No sweeties, Trev, remember? Wrong message.’
Trev did as he was told. What Blaylock gave the expectant children instead was a smart salute, before the convoy left them in its roaring wake.
At the foot of the Bila Valley the Warriors rolled up to a Bosnian Croat checkpoint, a lean-to hut manned by three HVO soldiers and marked on the road by a blunt cordon of black anti-tank mines spaced out across the muddy track. Blaylock slid unhurriedly down from his perch and strode toward the men, smacking his logbook into his palm, Tamara hastening behind him.
‘Doba dan, kako ste? Ja se zovem Captain Blaylock. United Nations? You have to let us through. We are not involved in combat. Humanitarian purpose only, yes?’
The guardsmen waved surly hands, made surly noises. Blaylock inclined to Tamara and she murmured translations in his ear. It was the usual issue of local compliance – demands to see papers bearing the scrawled hand of local commanders, a tiresome delay. Blaylock had his standard-issue riposte good and ready.
‘No, no. We’re not at your disposal, okay? We don’t run back and forth fetching paper. Our way through has been agreed with your command, you’ve no right to stop the UN.’
The men coughed and spat on the earth in the manner Blaylock had come to consider singularly Slavic. Though he spoke the truth he couldn’t quite blame them for their suspicious minds. These Warrior tours were, after all, a kind of spying. So he watched them impassively while they conferred. They had the look of a peasant army – ill-sorted villagers, schoolteachers and bus drivers who had been handed rifles and pressed hastily into ragged green fatigues like schoolboy football bibs doled out of a bag. Less naïve to his eye, though, were the red-and-white chequered badges pinned to their camouflage vests, insignia that struck him as undyingly fascistic.
He had seen more menacing Croat forces on his travels – tough twenty-somethings, gun-toting spirit drinkers, bristling with skull-and-crossbones logos and commando accoutrements. Blaylock found it easy to imagine the worst of them. His view had been coloured by tales from the departing Cheshire Regiment about the miserable task of ‘clear-up’ after a massacre in a small Muslim village – extracting blackened bodies from burned-out houses in white bags while Croat neighbours looked on, hard-faced, their own hearths unscathed.
By contrast his encounters with Bosnian Muslims had been affable. These were the people from whom the army was renting its roof, who did the chores around camp. The Bosnian forces he met at checkpoints struck him as reasonable people, rightly aggrieved, and badly under-resourced for war. If Blaylock had not exactly picked a side in this three-cornered fight, he had certainly formed an opinion.
The Croat guards began grumpily to poke their mines toward the roadsides with the toes of their boots. Blaylock was glad to see them roll over without a fuss. Insofar as he understood leadership in this strange moral quagmire, it meant sticking by the rules of engagement the Major handed down: You will at all times show purpose, et cetera.
With the way past the HVO checkpoint cleared, Blaylock clambered back atop his Warrior and pressed the intercom.
‘Cookie? Howay, let’s roll.’
‘Any chance of a piss-break, boss?’
At a suitable remove the convoy halted and Blaylock’s boys lined up like racehorses to urinate in spattering style up against the Warrior’s tracks. Out of sight Blaylock shared a smoke with Tamara, half a red Marlboro he didn’t much want. But the mood of the garrison seemed to have sucked everyone into the habit – this, and the sheer usefulness of smokes as checkpoint currency, the proffered gratis pack often pre-empting exchanges about ‘papers’.
Small talk with Tamara was fitful. Blaylock asked after her doleful little daughter, a recent visitor to the garrison. Tamara replied shyly. Blaylock could sense that she considered herself on duty at all times: this job was a big deal for her, maybe a ticket out of Vitez. She was a grafter and had, clearly, earned the respect of the troops, since
Blaylock had overheard no unprintable nicknames for her, no excessive banter about her breasts or backside.
He kicked a stray rock as he waited for his men to zip up. From backgrounds only marginally tougher than his own, they seemed at all times ready to be led by him – so long, he felt, as he made plain his concern for their welfare.
Belfast had been useful in that line – for all its bone-chilling shifts of surveillance on top of Divis Tower, the tedium and perpetual brew-ups, the observation post becoming a kind of confessional box. When Cookie had haltingly sought ‘a personal word’, Blaylock had heard him out soberly, without judgement, and had been much relieved a week later when it transpired that the lad had not, in fact, impregnated his girlfriend’s sixteen-year-old sister. Such cares were repaid the day Blaylock led his men into a terraced house purportedly rammed with IRA weapons and instead ran into a command-wire bomb-blast – mercifully mistimed. He had suffered no worse than to see his world turn white and then black for some moments; and when he swam back to his senses he found Cookie already bandaging up his bleeding foot.
This was leadership as Blaylock had come to understand it: not just to be the biggest dog with the loudest voice, but strong enough to show kindness and make mistakes – albeit never so weak as to let anyone give out shit. He would never forget his first weeks at Sandhurst, moments when the discipline was so inflexibly unforgiving he felt a gulf in his chest and the ground of his resolve giving way beneath him. Failure was inconceivable – the jack wagon back to County Durham would have stamped him indelibly as second-rate goods. And so he had rallied, ‘found his bollocks’, learned to take a bollocking from the Colour Sergeant, to swear he would do better then focus on nothing but that – to swallow the mindless neatness and oppressive order, to zone out the stinging rain and the leeching mud. He had dug just enough of what was needed from himself, and felt himself change in the process. A sense of kinship with his comrades – stoic, striving fellow sufferers! – had settled on his shoulders like the rain.