The Knives

by Richard T. Kelly

  ‘What’s wrong with the story?’

  ‘A narrowness of focus … People being tribal, they’d rather report their kneejerk perception of an issue than the actual information that might make the thing intelligible to debate.’

  ‘So what’s to be done?’

  ‘That’s why we’re talking now. You can change it, Abigail. Start with the bathroom mirror.’

  She looked at him from under sceptical eyebrows. Was she offended? She hadn’t touched her wine for some time.

  ‘I mean, don’t you think you come at things with biases?’

  ‘I don’t have any particular politics, if that’s what you mean. That would seem to me … backward. If you see the big picture then the problems are the same, the differences in approach are quite marginal. That’s why one looks to find the interest in individuals …’

  His phone vibrated. He ignored it but to his dismay she stood up.

  ‘Look, thank you for this. I’m sorry if I seemed … testy.’

  ‘No problem. Some recompense for my bad manners. I hope it was worth your time.’

  ‘Well, I still need something to write about for tomorrow. Maybe I should have gone out dancing instead …’ Indeed she shimmied and twirled lightly on her toes as she stooped to retrieve her bag from the sofa. He felt leaden by comparison.

  ‘Why don’t you take a closer look at Jason Malahide? And his head for business? You’re interested in money. So is he, but it’s quite a short CV for all what comes out of his mouth.’

  ‘I see. Where would I start? With what?’

  ‘Ask what business has he really ever run? He’s wheeled and dealed, sure, I don’t say he would sell his own grandmother but he wouldn’t think twice about selling yours.’

  She smiled. ‘Why would you want to—?’

  ‘I don’t like people who talk big.’

  ‘From the man who said, “The buck stops with me”?’

  ‘I take that back – I don’t like people who don’t really believe what they say they believe in. Because it’s a game to them. It’s not a game.’

  ‘Okay. Can I call you?’

  ‘I don’t give my number to journalists. Mark Tallis does that stuff.’

  ‘How about you take mine?’ She fished and handed him a card.

  ‘Good to meet you, Abigail.’ He extended a hand and she took it lightly, slung her bag over her shoulder and was off. He was sorry to see her go. It had been an amusing dance – a minuet, of sorts. Had he been shooting his mouth off, packaging his past again? Those qualms were creeping over him. But her presence had challenged him, incited him, put him in a curious mood. It was almost too much excitement for one day.

  Later, before he drifted off to sleep, he was thinking of her still – the quizzical tilted jaw-line, the violet eyes and the golden bob, the necklace draped languidly between her clavicles, the way she had said ‘I wouldn’t blame you’ that seemed to betoken a tough-minded customer – the sort of woman he had always tended to admire. But while he still felt riled by Jennie’s hard verdict on his speech, the pert appraising glances of this Abigail Hassall had rubbed him more the right way.

  EVENING STANDARD

  October 12

  EAST LONDON FBB PROTEST MARRED BY CLASHES

  A Met-approved ‘static protest’ by the Free Briton Brigade (FBB) in one of east London’s most diverse areas erupted in violence last night when disputes broke out between FBB members and ‘anti-fascist’ campaigners who had also obtained police permission to demonstrate in the same street. After arrangements jointly agreed with police broke down in disarray, officers had to move in to separate the rival groups, culminating in scuffles and arrests.

  FBB members gathered as agreed for their static protest at 6.30 p.m. The counter-protest – billed as a ‘celebration of diversity’ by the Fascists Out! campaign group – set up behind a cordon on the other side of Forest Road where demonstrators made speeches. By 6.45 the FBB contingent had begun chants that counter-protesters later described as ‘provocative’. Some FBB demonstrators then began to walk up Forest Road, breaching the conditions of the protest. When counter-protesters tried to intervene they were restrained by police and jeered by the FBB, whereupon some pushed past the outnumbered police to confront FBB members face to face. Eventually police reinforcements arrived to stop the disorder and the two groups were dispersed.

  The Home Secretary David Blaylock, who approved the original ban on the planned FBB march, gave a statement: ‘In retrospect the police ought perhaps to have imposed tougher conditions on the protest, but the protesters have no excuse for their behaviour, and any attempt to repeat it on our streets will not be tolerated.’

  ‘We’re anti-fascists,’ one local counter-protester, who asked not to be named, told the Standard. ‘These are our streets, and we’re not having the fascist FBB coming round.’

  The FBB calls itself a ‘human rights movement’ opposed to ‘Islamist extremism’, though critics accuse it of racism. The group today issued a joint statement signed by its co-directors Duncan Scarth and Gary Wardell in which they wrote: ‘Our determination to make our voices heard is redoubled. We will not be deterred by Islamists who wish for an Islamic state within the British state, or by their fellow travellers, the risible far-left. Our resistance will turn back this tide. It can be done and it will be done.’

  PART IV

  1

  ‘All around the world Muslims are targeted, their lives are held dirt-cheap. They live in the crosshairs of drones, man. And them crosshairs are a symbol, of how the Muslim man is forced to be in this world. A target. And why? For what crime? For the crime of standing up and fighting for his brothers …’

  The unit of display was Villiers’s slim black tablet. The video showed a young Asian man, London-accented, clad like a ninja in front of a shoddily slung khaki backdrop. It occurred to Blaylock that a surveillance operative would find the MI5 chief’s browsing history to be quite a horror show. Villiers himself was impassive, bridging his fingers as he studied Blaylock’s response.

  ‘Your brothers are suffering, paying with their lives. We need to get off our knees, get the boot of the West off our necks. “An eye for an eye, a life for a life”, like it says in the Holy Koran …’

  ‘So, yes, Mehdi Ahmad,’ murmured Villiers. ‘We’ve had him on the watch list three or four months. It was just after five this morning when Brian’s boys moved in to nab him at his address in Ruislip.’

  ‘My brothers in Britain, I call on you to join me in jihad. This is war and I am taking up arms, for I am a soldier!’

  You’re a shit-house, was Blaylock’s overriding thought as he tossed his pen onto his notepad.

  ‘The patterns of Mr Ahmad’s web use became alarmingly transparent – hate preachers, suicide videos, instructions in explosives. A friend gave him the run of a garage and he tried out a few crude compounds – HMTD, hydrogen peroxide, camping shop blocks of hexamine, supermarket lemon juice. He had made a recce or two on public transport. However, when it came to recording his last will and testament he got somewhat ahead of himself.’

  ‘This Britain, this filthy island, is a sewer …’

  ‘What do we know of his family background?’

  ‘Bangladeshi. The father owns several takeaways. They claim to be “shocked”, though possibly less than some we’ve come across.’

  ‘All it requires is a purpose, a plan, to take leave of this world, and then you can be redeemed. Your life, your death, belongs to the master.’

  Brian Shoulder of the Yard leaned in. ‘Up to maybe a year ago this was a lad who just liked his tunes and his clobber and chasing young ladies. Then he got pumped up on steroids. Told his folks he fancied going to the Yemen to study. Winds up at Russell College.’

  ‘Not exactly the wretched of the earth,’ Blaylock murmured.

  ‘By no means,’ offered Villiers. ‘And yet his sense of grievance is fairly virulent. At Russell he seemed to take charge of the Islamic Society, favoured the pra
yer room to classes, started telling his friends they were fools and young women that they were whores.’

  ‘That’, said Blaylock, ‘is a story I’m familiar with.’

  ‘Politicians? Not one of them is a man of honour, not one of them is even a man, these cowards …’

  ‘Okay, that’s enough of the great orator. Well done on picking him up before he did anything awful.’

  Blaylock was pensive once Villiers and Shoulder left him. In a few days’ time he would convene his monthly gathering of selected Muslim community representatives for the ‘Counter-Extremism meeting’. It had been on his mind already that some hard words would have to be spoken there. Now he had the notion they might have to be harder still.

  The shame of it was that he had been looking forward to renewing his acquaintance with Sadaqat Osman, the young man from Essex having indicated willingness to attend in return for Blaylock’s honouring of the offer to join the Goresford Centre’s November excursion to North Yorkshire. Blaylock had personally approved a discretionary grant that made the trip possible, and thought it money well spent. Other monies in the Counter-Extremism budget, though, he increasingly felt to be of lesser merit.

  *

  ‘You’re looking sombre, patrón,’ observed Mark Tallis once Blaylock had shut himself and his spads into his office.

  ‘Churchgoing,’ muttered Blaylock. His dark suit and tie were for the purpose of a special service he would be attending, an annual memorial for young victims of violent crime. But he was, more generally, in a riled state, and over more than just the dismal rhetoric of the apprehended Mehdi Ahmad.

  His post-conference return to work had proved a familiar disappointment. It seemed to Blaylock that in those rare stretches of time when he felt charged and fighting fit, the disposition of his department declined – in a manner somehow reciprocal – to its most listless, mulish and glum. He was further haunted by the possibility that some of his Shovell Street colleagues shared Jennie’s critique of how he had carried himself in Birmingham – namely, that he had been posturing, showboating, writing cheques with his mouth – and, worse, that the critique perhaps carried weight.

  Now courtesy of Mark he had to mull over the front page of the Post, whose editor had made good his conference threat to launch a sort of crusade. ‘TAKE BACK THE HOME: NO MORE WOMEN MUST DIE OF NEGLECT’ was the headline, illustrated by a collage of snapshots of women wreathed in heedless, heartbreaking smiles. Blaylock recognised only a few of the faces, but knew with a sinking heart that all of these women must have met their deaths by violence. Pages two and three were largely given over to an editorial letter addressed to him, crying special outrage over abusive partners – murderers – who had been foreign nationals illegally resident in Britain at the time of their offence.

  ‘So, we understand it’s a campaign, and it’ll run all this week, maybe next,’ said Tallis. ‘Obviously they put it out cold to get us on the back foot. But we need a response.’

  ‘We make clear we take it seriously, recap what we already do, tell them I am currently reviewing a number of options.’

  ‘What are those options?’ enquired Deborah.

  Blaylock gestured vaguely. He had no intention of consenting to set up some talking-shop inquiry; yet ever since his disconcerting encounter with Mrs Marjorie Michaels he had borne it in mind to seek some emergency funding for refuges. He still shrank, however, from the discussion he would need to have with Caroline Tennant.

  They moved on with other pressing matters. Roger Quarmby, the Inspector of Immigration and Border Services, was due to deliver his draft report on the Home Office’s performance on Wednesday morning. Blaylock was hopeful that all systems and procedures under his watch would be judged competent. He could not quite bear to contemplate the alternative. Monday week, meanwhile, would bring quarterly crime figures. Here, Blaylock felt the hopes for a favourable outcome were on firmer ground, and he intended to make a fuss about it.

  ‘Ben, I want you to fix me up a visit to Richard Colls’s patch in Gravesend for that Monday. I want to get out and about, take a look at every policing and crime prevention project we’ve got a stake in, right?’

  Ben reminded him he was already booked to visit an innovative community policing project in Cogwich, Essex, in three days’ time. Blaylock remembered this was the day he had assured Jennie that he would find some work activity to which he could escort Alex. After a hasty call to Cogwich his party secured a plus-one.

  *

  As much as the occasion filled Blaylock with unease, some kind of respectful solemnity suffused him as he had climbed the steps to the Corinthian portico and entered the church. The worshipful symmetry of the nave, the chestnut pews, the ribbed and vaulted ceiling – all served to persuade him he had a place in a larger piety.

  The house was full, up to the galleries. Blaylock was escorted to a front seat and so brought face to face with the weight of the occasion – for beyond the altar rail was a careful stepped arrangement of treasured photographs, a mosaic of faces, candles lit beneath each, so humanising a sight Blaylock would otherwise have thought akin to the wall of a police incident room. The shrine marked the aggregate of pain in the room, people who soldiered on with unanswerable losses.

  Choristers proceeded down the aisle, the vicar stepped into the pulpit and welcomed the congregation to ‘our annual memorial, for which we are proud to collaborate with Mrs Diane Cleeve and Remember the Victims’.

  Blaylock glanced across the aisle to see Mrs Cleeve nod slightly from sedentary, as was her way. Her bearing spoke of a dignity that was fiercely prized and wanted few words to support it. Fifty-ish, white-blonde, black-suited, her glasses darkly tinted, Mrs Cleeve seemed herself an emblem of a kind of chastening, upright remembrance.

  Seven years ago her twenty-year-old daughter Mandy had been raped and killed by a man she had been seeing for some months, a Slovakian named Jakub Reznik with a previous conviction, who fled back to Slovakia but left his DNA at the scene. Captured three weeks later he had pled not guilty. Mrs Cleeve had told a reporter that Reznik was ‘a filthy coward without the guts even to confess’. He was now serving a minimum-term life sentence, and would be deported on release. Mrs Cleeve had meantime become founder and linchpin of Remember the Victims, her particular stress being an opposition to what she regarded as the unacceptable porosity of Europe’s borders. She had stood shoulder to shoulder with three previous Home Secretaries, and Blaylock knew he had to occupy the same ground. He could not afford to have Mrs Cleeve think he was going soft.

  When the service was done he went to pay his respects, deterred just a little by the hulking shaven-headed man, unfamiliar to him, who stood by Mrs Cleeve’s side. She wasted no time on niceties.

  ‘I want to come and see you, Mr Blaylock, if that’s alright by you. There’s a matter I’d like to discuss.’

  ‘Of course. Next week perhaps? You’ll contact Geraldine?’

  She was curt, but Blaylock knew better than to take it personally. In an instant she was shepherded away by her imposing chaperone.

  *

  The afternoon brought a fillip, anticipated but no less welcome for that. Blaylock learned from Griff Sedgley that Lord Waugh had pronounced himself satisfied by Caleb Aldrich’s assurances and thus supported the ‘immediate removal’ to the United States of the terror suspect Vinayak Khan. Cheered that he had something in the bag with which to please the government benches in the Commons, at the close of the day he called Jennie, armed with the excuse of relaying that he would take Alex with him to Cogwich on Thursday.

  Jennie, though, was still cloistered at her chambers, fretting over a speech she was due to deliver in a few hours’ time to a room full of fellow human rights barristers. Touched by the nervy distraction in her voice – however polished in performance, Jennie always fretted over every bout of public speaking – Blaylock idly scribbled a note of the venue she mentioned, a fashionable set of chambers in Bloomsbury.

  He reached Alex at home
, the nanny putting the boy on the line.

  ‘Sure you don’t fancy the Arsenal tomorrow night, son?’

  ‘Nope. I’m going to see Battleship Potemkin.’

  ‘I thought you’d missed your chance?’

  ‘Naw. I lied about that.’

  ‘Right. Hope it’s all you hoped for. Are you taking a date?’

  ‘Nope, going with a mate.’

  ‘Cultured mates you have.’

  Alex laughed brashly. ‘This guy? Yeah, he’s pretty cultured …’

  Blaylock hung up in haste for he had seen a familiar silhouette pass his door. He darted out, saw Fusi the football-mad security guard heading down the hall, and hailed him.

  ‘Fusi! Fancy seeing your beloved Chelsea at the Emirates tomorrow night? You’ll get your dinner, too.’

  *

  As the dark came down he called into Downing Street for the ‘Line of Duty’ Police Awards honouring acts of major bravery by warranted officers. He had resolved to keep his appearance brief, and then see if he might surprise Jennie by turning up to her speech. But noticing Commissioner Bannerman at the threshold of the upstairs reception room, unattended by consiglieri, Blaylock sought a quiet word.

  ‘Can we talk about domestic violence?’

  ‘Ah yes, you’re having your turn in the tabloid hot seat? So the wheel turns.’

  ‘You can be assured I’ve had nothing but praise for the police response. But in your view is there any way it could be improved?’

  ‘Oh, I’m quite sure if constabularies had the funding and the numbers they’d want dedicated units. But that’s not going to happen soon, is it? The biggest problem still is when the victim doesn’t support the prosecution. Your lapel cameras, they might help with that. But not quickly. Cheer up, though.’ Bannerman patted Blaylock’s shoulder. ‘It could be something for your “restorative justice” wheeze. Where, say, you have a man who wants to spend all the benefit on strong lager, and his wife who’d have him spend half at most? Maybe some negotiated settlement is doable …’