The Knives

by Richard T. Kelly

‘Bet you spat out your coffee at that, Becky.’

  Becky, however, merely blinked. She did not waver.

  ‘No. If it’s a woman and I’m “fascinating” it means she wants to talk about my ex-wife and all that. No chance.’

  In his sights was the larger meeting room adjacent to his office and it was filling up, key personnel of the immigration team slipping past him and Becky, giving half-smiles and rather wide berths. Blaylock turned away, knowing nonetheless that Becky would not roll over.

  ‘I expect she’ll do a profile on you in any case.’

  ‘Then she can get all she needs off the internet.’

  ‘Would you go for a run round the park with her?’

  Turning once more he saw Becky’s tongue was in her cheek.

  ‘As of tomorrow – and, so you know, for the foreseeable? – I’ll be doing my morning run in the gym.’

  *

  Eric Manning, Director-General of Immigration, was a neat and tidy fellow with gentle manners and a tendency to dress up bad news. Blaylock watched him polishing his designer spectacles as they sat, and he knew what was coming.

  ‘Well,’ Eric said and blew out his cheeks. ‘The figures are in and we do have a notable year-on rise in new migrants over the first six months of this year. Twenty-one thousand or so, to be precise.’

  ‘The net total of newcomers being?’

  ‘One hundred and seventy thousand, two hundred and nineteen.’

  Blaylock pressed his forehead into the palms of his hands, involuntarily. What if that was a city? How big would it be? York? Luton? My constituency?

  He was surprised upon looking up once more to see faces round the table bearing expressions of concern, in particular his Junior Minister Guy Walters, the young, loyal, not terribly bright MP for Kingsworthy.

  ‘Home Secretary?’ said Walters. ‘Are you—?’

  ‘Sorry. Go on, Eric.’

  Manning continued. ‘The rises are equal in EU and non-EU, but the latter remains ahead overall. But, there are some encouraging trends. Numbers of foreign students are down again.’

  Bloody Malahide will be all over that, thought Blaylock.

  ‘That said, some concerns in the other direction are a nine per cent rise in asylum applications, and a notable fall in the numbers of illegal migrants forcibly removed or leaving of their own accord. Also fewer Britons have gone off to live abroad, but we have rising numbers coming in from Spain, Italy, France – the wine belt, oddly.’

  ‘I’m all for southerners heading north,’ Blaylock murmured. Someone chuckled – Ben? But he was disconsolate. He yearned to see this issue afresh, not so wearied by the years, but it appeared intractable. And he had come to understand how it told on longer servers than himself – why staff who could hardly be considered departmental veterans nonetheless looked suddenly aged and helpless.

  The immigration system creaked. No available resources could be thought adequate, no figures truly accurate. And no truly talented staffers wanted anything to do with it, while those who were politely forced into it just served their time counting beans down in Croydon. Blaylock could all too easily imagine some of them, overwhelmed by the workload, afflicted by paralysis, pushing obstinate figures into a drawer and turning a key. He could picture secret lock-ups – warehouses, even – jammed with cabinets full of abandoned immigration case files. It was one of his second-order stay-awakes at night.

  Indisputably of the first order, though, was the fact of party conference in a fortnight when he would be required to say that immigration was falling, which would, on present evidence, be to say that black was white. It was a party political problem, thus not one shared by the permanent civil service round the table, yet he was compelled to make everyone feel the urgency.

  ‘This is not good,’ said Blaylock, finally.

  Eric cleared his throat. ‘It’s not ideal. But there is, if you like, an upbeat story to tell here, about people wanting to come to this country – hard-working people, contributing to our economy.’

  ‘Eric, I’d love to have that view, it’s obviously a sweet deal for coffee-shops to get their baristas from Bucharest. But the public think immigration’s too high and that it makes problems, and we said we’d lower it, so that is our mission and anything shy of that is a failure.’

  ‘That people believe it doesn’t make it so, not statistically. And it overlooks the wider benefits.’

  ‘In my constituency, in all the old industrial areas, people seem to feel it can reduce their opportunities in life. They’re not bothered by how cheap it is for Londoners to get a nanny or a cleaner or a loft conversion.’

  ‘Minister, we should be wary of broad-brush caricatures—’

  Blaylock felt the reproof – dimly aware, as of a backache or toothache, that the picture he bore in mind of the hypocrisy of Londoners was near enough a picture of his ex-wife. Still, he rallied.

  ‘We also have to be wary of discounting what people say is their experience. They’re not to be damned as bigots or belittled as fools just for objecting to the rate of change in a place they thought they knew.’

  He pulled up, judging from the looks round the table that he had begun to beat on a drum in a manner his audience found strident.

  ‘Look, if we all want to be relaxed about immigration we just have to show we have control of the numbers. Over a decade we’ve had several million more guests in this country than the public were bargaining for, and the levels keep ticking up. So, we need to ensure our guests are good guests. Right? And that we manage those levels, in a way that speaks well of diversity – not adversely. We have a sensible target of what the levels ought to be. Right now, we’re missing it. By a mile.’

  Guy Walters, frowning, elbows on desk, raised a hand. ‘Eric says forcible removals are in decline. Then isn’t it time to get the troops out?’

  ‘What do you have in mind, Guy?’

  Walters’s whole frame roiled with keenness. ‘As I understood it, we’ve got a database full of tip-offs from the public about illegals. Let’s get our Enforcement teams out on the road, make a big day of hunting these people down – house calls, spot checks at dodgy workplaces. Send a message, yes? If people think all we ever do is talk about clamping down then, hey, let’s get clamping!’

  Blaylock pondered. The plan had a brute simplicity, rather in the manner of its author.

  Ben Cotesworth, though, looked rattled. ‘David, there’s a big, big problem with that kind of tactic. People will say we’ve gone fishing – just based on gossip, on nosey neighbours. In that database you’ll have a whole load of hoax calls, malicious calls, rival curry-houses having a pop at each other. You’ll be taking the word of narks. And, yeah, bigots.’

  ‘Ben, I don’t doubt there’ll be a few wrong steers but, howay, we’re not Gestapo. If people have their papers on them then they can go about their business.’

  ‘It’s a stunt, but. It’s showbiz. A big hassle knocked off in a day just for headlines. If we want to do this we should at least do it right – review the data properly, plan it, use some stealth.’

  Blaylock felt sharply what Ben was accusing him of – of trying to look big and tough and, rather, appearing cowed and small. He would not have suffered the charge from anyone but his protégé.

  It was true: he believed he was responding to steady silent pressures exerted from beyond the door. He loathed the idea of decisions made solely to get out of a short-term hole, for naked political interest. He loathed it especially because he had done it before, once or twice or three times. And now – he could feel it coming over him – he was going to do it again. Because, in the end, he didn’t hate expedience half as much as he loathed inertia.

  ‘Guy, you’re sure we have the data to hand, in good order?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Fifty thousand tip-offs reported by the public. If we don’t get a thousand expulsions I’ll walk naked down Whitehall.’

  ‘We’ll see about that. But, yes, let’s get it done. How soon?’

 
‘God, I mean … why not this week? Friday?’

  Blaylock nodded assent, and looked to Ben, who had folded his arms, sunk his chin in his chest and tilted back in his chair – a posture Blaylock used to observe in his son during the final grim months before divorce and exile from the family home.

  As the team filed out Geraldine was there, looking custodial, and she steered Blaylock lightly by the elbow toward his office.

  ‘Some interception warrants have turned up in quite a batch, maybe you could sign them off now?’

  Blaylock sat at his desk so as to treat with seriousness two dozen or so requests from MI5 to approve intrusive surveillance on select individuals – wire-tapping, room-bugging, plain-clothes observation.

  The subjects were suspected Islamists in the main, plus a couple of Irish republicans, and a suspiciously shiftless Russian ‘tourist’. Blaylock read as carefully as he could. He refused to be cowed or made star-struck by the spooks – wanting, rather, to form his own judgements based on the evidence. He could not, however, scrutinise every warrant line by line. More often he was resigned to trusting these secret, untested hunches, these informed suspicions of conspiracy and wickedness. He felt some sort of force steering his hand as he scribbled his signature – the duty to protect, his duty as minister for the interior, hardened by the fear of what failure might constitute. The spooks were nameless and faceless to the public, but he was the poster-boy for national security; and if wickedness came to pass then the public would require a public figure, like a target, on whom it could pin the tail of blame.

  The various Islamist suspects depressed Blaylock especially. Some looked like little more than young men with talents for delinquent nastiness, and driving ambitions, apparently supported by holy writ, to become nastier still. These were petty-criminal converts, for whom Islam seemed to be a handy means of rebranding the society against which they offended – the authorities that had, quite reasonably, punished them – as a den of corrupt kuffars. Others in the pile of warrants, though, appeared to be model pupils, ‘clean skins’, and yet observed to have been keeping company with existing ‘subjects of interest’.

  Blaylock found himself staring at one such application, made against a youth whose sins amounted to ‘accessing extremist material on the internet’. Considering it a worthwhile exercise to query the spooks once in a while, Blaylock picked up his secure telephone to MI5. In the next moment his BlackBerry beeped and he checked the screen. It was a text from his ex-wife Jennie: Just heard the news about your run-in this morning!? You okay? Jx

  He thought for a moment, picked up the device, and started to tap out a reply. The effort to sound both laconic and glad of her concern took him some moments more than he had planned for, such that when Geraldine knocked and re-entered he had forgotten his qualms over the stray warrant. He signed it and passed the pile in toto over to Geraldine.

  *

  At lunch-hour Norman Dalton, Minister for Policing, rapped on Blaylock’s door, back from the first morning of the Chief Police Officers Conference and instructed to debrief Blaylock on the mood. Dalton bore two bacon butties from the greasy spoon in the next street, and he and Blaylock stepped out to seek one of the seated areas dotted round Level Three where staff members could eat lunch. Passing the line of black pod-like soundproofed cubicles provided for quiet solo work, Blaylock found himself, as ever, imagining staff accidentally trapped inside and shrieking for help unheard; or else stealing crafty naps with their heads cradled in their arms.

  They found chairs and Dalton unwrapped his treats. Blaylock found Dalton canny and competent, a seasoned fifty-something albeit with the look of an outsized schoolboy, perpetually pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose.

  ‘So, Bannerman’s speaking tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, that’ll be your pleasure if you get there early. I hear he’ll go big on reasserting the Met’s operational independence. Anyone would think he was feeling threatened. I had to listen to Martin Pallister being his irrepressible self, giving it the full class war. “Them bloody Tories, looking down their noses at the honest British bobby, they just want a better class of officer what talks proper, don’t you know?”’

  ‘He didn’t actually say that?’

  ‘He certainly said that Tories have a problem with the, I quote, “ordinary working-class make-up of our rank-and-file police”.’

  ‘Well I never …’

  If pushed Blaylock would have said he had greater problems with the Rotarian petit bourgeois make-up of police chief constables. He had suffered enough dinners with them as they dawdled over desserts and digestifs, their waistlines and self-estimations swelled by six-figure salaries and gold-plated pensions.

  ‘Anyhow, Pallister got cheered to the rafters. I dunno, it feels like a bit of a goading atmosphere in the place, chief. Take your tin hat.’

  ‘I’ve a few bones to throw. It’s not all make-do and mend. We’re saying there’s money for hi-tech innovation; there must be some in the crowd who think it’s better the cops have gear that’s at least as good as the phones they’ve got in their pockets?’

  ‘Maybe. But, you know – stick a camera on every copper and there’ll be some reckon it’s there to watch them, not the baddies. You might need one or two more bones …’ Dalton wiped ketchup off his fingers. ‘You know, after you they’ve given the big evening speech to Madolyn Redpath? She’ll give us a pasting, you know what she’s like.’

  ‘I don’t. Never heard of her.’

  ‘You sure? She was outside the building just now waving a bullhorn in people’s faces …’

  Dalton struggled to his feet and jerked a thumb toward a long window with a vantage on the Shovell Street entrance. Blaylock got up and followed.

  ‘And, sorry, who is she?’

  ‘She leads on policy for Custodes, the civil liberties lot? Quite the crusader. And hardly out of school uniform.’

  They peered through the window with their heads close together and could still make out a gaggle of demonstrators massed at the correct remove from the entrance. But the young woman with the bullhorn appeared to have abandoned her post. On returning to his desk, however, Blaylock saw that a newly lodged petition sat atop his in-tray, calling for change in the conditions of women inmates awaiting deportation at detention centres. The covering letter bore the insignia of Custodes and the signature of Ms Madolyn Redpath.

  *

  Blaylock spent an hour on pointed business calls – ‘recorded meetings’ – with Cabinet colleagues, while Geraldine listened in on headphones, taking minutes amid pin-drop silence. Needing bones to throw to the cops, he secured from Simon Webster Justice’s continued funding for ‘neighbourhood courts’ to relieve police of processing blatantly guilty young offenders. Webster was blithe: ‘David, it’s a million saved in admin and court orders, so we’ll get top marks from Caroline.’

  He was done in time for his regular briefing from Griff Sedgley, leading silk at the chambers that took a lion’s share of Home Office briefs. Hawkish of feature, fastidious of collar and cuff, Sedgley exuded a leather-bound quietude by which Blaylock was always assured.

  Their chief item of business was the protracted extradition to the United States of Vinayak Khan, a Londoner wanted for trial by Homeland Security on charges of aiding and abetting known terrorists. Khan had committed his alleged offences nearly a decade ago in front of a computer screen in Willesden Green – a ‘web-spinner’, as Blaylock saw him, joining up cyber-threads such that bomb-making instructions could be cleanly relayed across continents, or a weapons training camp disguised as outward-bound adventure in the wilds of Oregon. The European Court of Human Rights maintained that extradition should not happen before the outcome of a final appeal to the Grand Chamber in Strasbourg, to which Khan’s lawyers had made strenuous presentation that he be tried in the UK.

  ‘I’m not withdrawing the extradition order,’ said Blaylock.

  ‘If you don’t,’ murmured Sedgley, ‘you could be found in contempt of
court.’

  ‘That would be a not madly inaccurate assessment of my view. Let’s see how the judge responds to Strasbourg tomorrow.’

  They moved on to domestic business: eleventh-hour applications to overturn deportation decisions, most of them drawing on human rights law. A reformed Jamaican drug dealer, already booked on a flight back to Montego Bay, was poorly and pleading that he couldn’t hope to subsist anywhere but England. A Somali man with form for assault now awaited a plane to Mogadishu, but his lawyer argued that he would thence be in mortal danger from Islamist militants. To Blaylock the process always seemed a ladder, very often one step up and two back, there to tread on a snake and slip back to the start of things, where the press and MPs lay in wait to curse the Home Office for incompetence.

  ‘Geraldine, when do I get my sit-down with the new Lord Chief Justice?’

  ‘Lord Waugh’s office say he’s been chock-a-block but I’ll chase,’ said Geraldine, scribbling.

  ‘Now this one’, said Sedgley, ‘is at Special Appeals and you should know it’s looking … problematical.’ He passed Blaylock a set of papers marked Bazelli v Secretary of State for the Home Department. ‘Mr Bazelli is a Bosnian who came to the UK with his father twenty years ago.’

  ‘Fleeing the war?’

  ‘Indeed. He got indefinite leave to remain, since when his adult life has been a stream of convictions – theft, assault, handling stolen goods. After four years in Scrubs he was meant to go back to Sarajevo; however … in the patented manner, before going down he impregnated his then-girlfriend and the child was born while he was inside.’

  ‘So he’s claiming “right to family life”?’ This expression never failed to cause a clenching sensation in Blaylock’s core.

  ‘Yup. The child’s British so, clearly, has a right to carry on being schooled here. And to have a father, even one so very derelict as Mr Bazelli. The first tribunal took our side, the second took theirs, tomorrow it’s back at the Special Court.’

  ‘Well, that’s a drag but hardly a novelty, right?’