Now the black Mercedes was pulling up and the Met Police tag-team coming forward at speed, radios to their mouths. Glancing to the young man held fast in Andy’s bulging arms, and at the grimacing bar-wielder being helped up into custody, Blaylock noted their widely amazed eyes – flabbergasted, understandably, by this rapid reaction, and by their incredible ill fortune in having selected this particular target on this particular morning.
Blaylock saw curtains twitching behind glass. Certain residents of Milner Street, SE11, had ventured out onto doorsteps to watch the two young men being patted down by police officers. Andy Grieve, relieved of his share of custodial duties, looked quietly perturbed. Blaylock stretched and massaged his grazed elbow and sore knuckles, letting the adrenalin beat its retreat back through his creaking body.
A regular police car turned into the street and burned to a standstill. As the two suspects were being passed over, Blaylock approached his Scotland Yard watch team.
‘Can I give you my statement or do I need to talk to them?’
‘We’ll probably want them to take this, sir.’
‘Okay, just let me get it done, eh?’
And so Blaylock lingered and described his intervention to a sober-sided young Asian constable.
‘So, to be clear, you hit him, sir?’
‘Well, yeah. I saw he’d a tool in his hand and was fully intending to hit me with it. So, yes, I gave him a tap first …’
Blaylock would have preferred some short verbal commendation for citizenry beyond the call and whatnot. But he wasn’t surprised. He had always struggled a little with how to talk to police: some vestige, maybe, of having had his collar felt aged sixteen, all mouth and full of beer, back in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham.
He was glad to see his chauffeured Jaguar cruise into Milner Street at last. As he moved, so Andy moved smartly to his side, and the Jag’s darkened passenger window slid down to reveal his Met-issued driver, Martin Keeble, sandy-haired, his pug face tanned as an Algarve golfer’s and wearing a ghost of a smirk.
‘Blimey, sir, what’ve you gone and done?’
*
In the cool, cushioned backseat of the Jag Blaylock retrieved his BlackBerry from the strongbox, called his private secretary Geraldine Bell and explained that his arrival to work would be delayed on account of an unforeseeable incident. A vicar’s daughter, Geraldine’s manner was impeccable, always concerned, never ruffled. Since she was required to know more or less his every waking move, also where and how he slept, Blaylock was ever reassured to have Geraldine as the safeguard of his secrets and foibles, and vaguely proud of the fact that in his conduct to date he had done nothing to cause her disappointment.
Andy, sat stolidly at his side, was a trickier case. They had not exchanged a word since the arrest, and Blaylock wondered if his silly scarpering stunt was felt to have been grievously out of order. It nagged at Blaylock, though – this permanent watch on his movements, the advance team plotting and reviewing wherever he might roam. For eighteen months Andy had been Blaylock’s close protection officer – sharing his private life, such as it was, a patient presence in Blaylock’s home, car and hotel rooms. And as much as they had in common – same age, both divorced dads, a Forces man and a Special Branch man – Blaylock was never fully at ease in their relations. There seemed something basically unmanning in the requirement that he be flanked by toughs at all times – thus his queer longing to slip the leash.
He had suffered the regimen ever since Patrick Vaughan summoned him to Number Ten on the morning after the election, to confirm what they both expected. Blaylock had left his count in Stockton-on-Tees to catch the first train from Darlington. (A simple life it had seemed, back then.) After the most perfunctory of chats amid the removal-van turmoil of Downing Street, and directly upon his firm handshake with the new Prime Minister, Blaylock found himself flanked by detectives. He stepped outside to the armour-plated Jaguar, coppers and police dogs all over him, and knew it would be this way morning, noon and night for as long as the Fates decreed he be Home Secretary in Her Majesty’s Government.
The rotating pairs of police guards were familiar faces now, and no real bother. They all struck him more or less as no-nonsense law-and-order Tories. He even wondered, on occasions, if he was sufficiently Tory for their tastes. Andy Grieve, though, was not so easily read.
‘Must say, boss,’ Andy spoke up, finally, ‘you stuck a pretty good one on that lad.’
Blaylock exhaled in relief. ‘Well, I don’t reckon it puts any hairs on my chest taking a pop at a teenager. But he’d have wrapped that wrecking bar round my head if I hadn’t. Or his mate would, if you and the cavalry hadn’t shown up.’
Andy clucked his tongue, ever calm and solicitous about misfortune, as Blaylock imagined he was with his teenage son. ‘Funny, though. I could see, soon as I rocked up into the street – you were up on your toes and weaving. Did you box in the regiment?’
‘Christ, no. In the regiment they really boxed. I’d have had seven bells knocked out of me.’ Blaylock chuckled, relaxing as a normally suppressed version of himself returned to the downstage of his person. ‘I did box in college at Durham, mind you. For a lark. I got roped in.’
‘How’d that happen?’
‘Oh, I was drinking in the bar one night and this lad I half-know staggers up, starts saying the boxing team’s one heavyweight short for a match the next day. I must have been half-cut ’cos I said, “Aw aye, I’ll step in, no bother, kidder.” I was thinking, “He’s more pissed than me, we’ll forget this by the morning.” But, oh no. No one forgot. So that was me in the ring the next night.’
‘How did you get on?’
‘I … got by. I remember that climbing through the ropes felt like a big, big act of willpower. But the lads just said, “Get out in the middle and throw punches for as long as you can breathe.” And right from the bell I just knew, the other lad was as green as me, he’d clearly been told the exact same thing. We were like two bloody windmills. Clinging to each other by the third round.’
‘Did you win?’
Blaylock affected a visor-eyed look of affront. ‘Of course, Andy. Points decision, like. I’d say there was marginally more blood streaming out of his nose than mine. I got back in the dressing room and the other lads – bastards – they just shook their heads and said, “Bloody fluke”.’
‘And after all the guidance they’d given you.’
‘Exactly. I did learn a fair bit, though, just from that one bout.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as how to get yourself braced and ready for someone running up to give you a massive clout.’
‘That is a good lesson, boss.’
‘Aye. And remains so.’
It was good to josh, in Blaylock’s view, though he knew he had to keep watch on the rougher things that amused him. He had been told so by the Prime Minister. ‘David, not everything in life is a fight. And not every fight is necessary.’ He accepted the critique – and yet resisted it, too, feeling an urge to push back. At times his basic view was that the way he carried himself, all things considered, was a net-positive to the people he served, and that his critics on the touchline – the bystanders who grab megaphones and make some noise, all the Twitterers and the gobshites – they could take it and shove it.
He knew, nonetheless, what Paddy Vaughan meant. Others closer to him had made similar observations, with far less forbearance.
As the conversation ebbed in the car Blaylock’s ears tuned in to the Today programme on the radio, where news anchor Laura Hampshire was quizzing someone on the topic of Ziad al-Kasser.
‘… Is it not the case that Mr al-Kasser argues for independent Muslim emirates within the UK where sharia is law?’
‘That is so, and if you are a Muslim in Bradford or Dewsbury or Tower Hamlets then sharia is what you should want …’
Blaylock recognised the debating tones of the self-styled Abou Jabirman, né Desmond Ricketts, a former plasterer known to old frie
nds as ‘Snowy’ – a Jamaican-British Muslim convert with a criminal record, now oft heard expounding in the media on matters of church and state.
‘… and in fact sharia is what a big, big part of our community does want and is comfortable with. So that wish should be considered legitimate and not to be, ah, interfered with or, ah, demonised.’
‘Yes, but do all Muslims in Bradford – even anywhere in the UK – do many Muslims consider, as Mr al-Kasser appears to, that women must accept Allah made them inferior, and that thieves should have their hands cut off?’
‘Well, you put things in your own words and out of their contexts but if you read the actual sermons of Ziad al-Kasser …’
Blaylock had already fished in the strongbox for a pen and a torn envelope, and now began to scribble notes for a letter to the BBC’s Head of News. Still, he overheard the next item – a report from the annual Chief Police Officers Conference, where Lancashire’s top cop was complaining of government cuts to their budgets.
‘They’re coming too thick and too fast. Just on my patch, month to month, thefts are up, burglary’s up, car crime and shoplifting up. So the government need to realise—’
Laura Hampshire cut in coolly. ‘I’m afraid, Chief Constable, I must stop you there, because Daniel Manningham is in south London for us, and we have reports coming in that the Home Secretary David Blaylock has been involved in a police incident near to his home in Kennington, an incident, I believe – is this right, Daniel? – in which Mr Blaylock helped to apprehend a criminal suspect?’
‘Yes, as we understand it, Laura, just before 6.30 a.m. police were called to this street by David Blaylock’s Scotland Yard protection team and bystanders have confirmed …’
Blaylock’s phone trilled and he checked the caller ID – Becky Maynard from his press office.
‘Good morning, Becky.’
‘Home Secretary, good morning, my god, are you okay?’
‘Of course.’
‘Are you okay to talk about it?’
‘Really. I’ve not got a scratch on me.’
‘Great, I mean, about how we handle it? The story? It’s going crazy here but my sense is the balance will come in positive for you, so it’s a definite opportunity to do something …’
Blaylock interrupted, seeing in his head the tumult of press officers now fielding five hundred calls. Briskly he dissuaded Becky from anything other than a brief statement. Slipping his phone back into his jacket he saw that Andy was regarding him with a half-smile.
‘Sir, just to say, in any sort of emergency – there’s really no point in your getting involved. I’ve got your back, y’know.’
Blaylock weighed his response for a moment or so. ‘Howay, Andy. We both know if I saw a real threat coming down I’d have that Glock off of you in two ticks. And I’d secure my own defence. But, cheers, yeah?’
Andy reclined sizeably into the Jaguar’s leather, as though to signal his ease at a ribbing from the boss; just as likely – Blaylock was sure – so as to let his tracksuit jacket slip fully open, the better to display the butt of the semi-automatic holstered snugly under his arm.
*
Back at home Blaylock showered, shaved and donned his navy Austin Reed suit, dodging the long mirror’s reflection, since it rarely lifted his spirits, and he needed to keep lively. The morning’s adrenalin rush was worn off, and familiar gloomier thoughts had moved back in.
He packed his ministerial red box with the day’s major pieces of paper. His speech to the police chiefs needed final sign-off. The latest – last? – round of objections to his legislation for identity cards had to be rehearsed. Cabinet would meet at 9.45 a.m. In two weeks’ time the House would rise for party conferences, and umpteen policy positions needed to be settled in advance. He had never felt more challengingly employed. And yet nor had he ever known such deep, overpowering moments of futility – not even at the lowest ebb of his tour in Bosnia.
As he was knotting his tie he heard Andy’s courteous rap on the bedroom door. He looked around the silent bedroom, to which he would retire, alone, come the evening – the unmade bed, the identical pressed navy suits hanging from the armoire doors, the desk stacked with colour-coded files, the panic button by the bedside lamp, the greying view through bulletproofed glass onto the Kennington square outside. This was the life he had made for himself – its duties and burdens, its powers and restraints, its solitude and confinement. He threw the duvet across the mattress – Box your blankets, sir! None of that civilian sloth! – and opened the door to Andy.
Downstairs as he exited the front door he recognised a hand-addressed envelope atop his private mail on the console table, and he doubled back and slipped it into his pocket.
2
The Jaguar rolled up to the great glass-box estate of the Home Office on Shovell Street, SW1, and Blaylock shifted from the backseat. Evidently, word of the morning’s ruckus had spread. By the entrance the press had mustered a scrum – men in anoraks, some with heavy microphones, which they wielded as if to disconcert more easily jostled females. In his peripheral vision Blaylock clocked a second minor threat – a handful of placard-waving demonstrators, chanting in the standard spirited manner, but seeming now to shuffle down the pavement toward the entrance from the far-flung pitch where they had surely been told to stay put. Taken together, the two groups made a fair din.
‘STOP DETAINING WOMEN! RESPECT THEIR RIGHT TO BE FREE!’
‘Minister! Any comment on your punch-up this morning?’
‘STOP DETAINING WOMEN! RESPECT THEIR RIGHT—’
‘Mr Blaylock! Is this the first time you’ve hit someone?’
Andy muscled a path through and Blaylock, blinking under the barrage of camera flashes, pressed on. Yet before he could get to the door a diminutive young woman in a smart woollen coat, striding forward from among the chanting demonstrators, succeeded somehow in ducking through the press pack to point a bullhorn at his ear.
‘Home Secretary, do you think it’s right to deport an innocent woman to certain death?’
The wincing reporters seemed to care no more than Blaylock for the query or its volume. And with that Blaylock was safely inside the relative hush of the reflective sanctum.
He negotiated the full-body security gate through to the vaulting atrium that looked up to four floors of hive-like activity. Never did he cross this space without thinking of his arrival at the Home Office eighteen months previously: the formal ‘Welcome’ from staff, many of whom had thronged the atrium, more of whom stayed close to their posts, such that he had peered up and around the walkways and balconies while tight-lipped faces gazed down at him, and he had been struck by a mental image of himself brought before them in a torn shirt, bound by the wrists on the back of a tumbril.
His route to the lifts was intercepted by Becky Maynard, tripping lightly down the stairs from Level One, a gleam of resolve in her eye such that Blaylock had rarely seen. It occurred to him he ought to hit somebody more often.
‘Bravo, Minister,’ said Becky, politely but firmly. ‘Just to say, I hear your position loud and clear, and if any big requests come in I’ll only run them by Geraldine just so you’re aware.’
Then she was off again, before he could instruct her not to bother Geraldine either. Not for the first time Blaylock had the strange sense of being surrounded by women – formidable, all, with cool heads and level gazes. From their assessing looks he somehow always took the meaning that he ought to take a moment to turn aside and tuck himself in.
He made it into a lift unhindered, ascended to Level Three, stepped out and strode past the cluster of offices occupied by his junior ministers and, more substantively, the department’s Permanent Secretary, before reaching the comfort zone of his own private office team: the engine room of the building, his eyes and ears and buffers, clever young people sifting high stacks of paper while speaking clearly and intently into phone receivers cocked between shoulder and ear.
Geraldine – bespectacled, her unma
nageable hair primped into a frizzy nimbus – came forward and greeted him with a nod toward his office door. There, arms folded, clearly wanting a private word, stood his special advisor Mark Tallis. Tall, dimple-jawed, privately educated, Tallis was his spad with special responsibility for ‘press liaison’ and the one among them most aggrieved by having to sit out in open plan desk space, fully separated from his master by a stairwell. Civil Service fiat, however, had forced the spads away from any closer proximity, as if to degrade the imagined powers of their dark arts.
‘David, bloody good effort this morning, patrón.’
‘Cheers, Mark.’
‘You saw the Post, though, that toe-rag having a go—?’
‘Easy, just give me five minutes with Geraldine, okay?’
She had moved silently to their side and Blaylock bade her into the office then shut the door behind them. His desk sat before the furthest window so as to make a dauntingly long walk for any bearer of bad news. But he and Geraldine took seats around the oval group meeting table parked midway, and she passed him the usual sheet of A4 confirming his day’s schedule. He frowned at an unexpected Item 1.
‘Sorry, but can you squeeze in Sheikh Hanifa and his friend from Russell College before Cabinet? Fifteen minutes?’
‘You mean they’re on their way?’
‘It did seem urgent …’
Blaylock nodded. Geraldine then presented him with a pair of letters and he scanned them. The first, from Sir James Bannerman, politely notified him of what he had already read in the papers: that the ‘Sylvie Affair’ would be scrutinised internally. The second was on the letterhead of the Mayor of Tower Hamlets but ran to several sheets, with the unmistakable look of a petition:
We, the undersigned call on you to ban a proposed march by the Free Briton Brigade in east London on September 30. Clearly this march has been planned to disturb community preparations for Eid-al-Fitr, and in such a place as to revive an ignominious tradition of fascists seeking to parade through multi-cultural east London. The FBB bring a message of hate to our borough. We call on you to secure our streets, protect our citizens, and ban this march!
The Knives Page 3