‘An emergency is an emergency, Caroline.’
‘Yes, but there must be more than one way to tackle it? I’m just surprised, David, you’re not more focused on a law enforcement solution – cracking down on the men, getting them out of the home and into custody. Whereupon, it surely follows, the refuges face less pressure?’
‘As you know, Caroline, I’m not in a position to ask the police to do more than they’re already doing.’
‘So you want to stick a bandage on the problem?’
‘To stop the bleeding. Yes.’
‘For ten million – where would you propose to make the corresponding budget cuts?’
‘Caroline,’ he scowled, ‘I’ve met my budget targets up to now, I’m cutting the police grant, counter-extremism monies … I came here to ask you for help from reserves.’
‘In entirety? Not possible. Have you looked again lately at your Borders and Immigration budget …?’
*
It was with a Pyrrhic sense of accomplishment that Blaylock returned to Shovell Street and summoned Mark Tallis.
‘Okay, I have a deal with Caroline; once it’s signed off we need to contact Marjorie Michaels and the Post. I’d like us to arrange some sort of meet-and-greet at a refuge, and the Post can be assured I’ve been happy to acknowledge the merits of their campaign and glad we share a view of this problem and what needs doing, et cetera.’
He noticed a text from Jennie – David do you have a moment to speak? Jx. – and he asked Mark for five minutes, hoping it might be more, their recent exchanges having offered so many moments that he had felt to be of real promise.
*
‘David, I wanted to talk, it should have been sooner, something I’ve been meaning to tell you … and I didn’t have the nerve in person, which is silly …’
Instantly Blaylock knew how this tune went, the mournful strains of goodbye and so sorry. He cursed himself for failing to see it, feeling abruptly like an adolescent in a hallway clutching the family’s Bakelite handset as his heart got filleted.
‘I’m seeing someone. For a while. I didn’t talk about it, didn’t assume it was serious, but … it’s gotten that way … . I mean … I’m part of a couple again, it seems. So I want to be straight about it with you.’
Taking the blow, Blaylock weighed his response, harder yet on account of her god-awful decorum that never faltered.
‘To be honest, Jennie … I mean, first of all, good for you, and second, you needn’t be so shy. It’s your life.’
‘That’s good of you to say, David. It’s because it’s about our kids, too. This is someone I think is going to be part of my life – part of their lives, too.’
‘Okay. That does sound – serious. But good, that you feel that way about someone.’
‘Yeah.’ He heard her exhale. ‘It is good, I think, David.’
‘Should I know anything about him? Anything you want to tell me? Not that you have to.’
‘No, his name’s Nick. Nick Gilchrist? You might even have heard of him, he makes films, documentaries? He’s well respected.’
Blaylock thought for a moment, tugging on memory’s threads, for there was certainly something there at the far end. ‘I think … I do. I might have seen something … Sorry, how long has it been? That you’ve been seeing him?’
‘Four months, maybe, we’ve been dating? We took it slow. The last couple, we’ve spent more time, done some things all together.’
Since the summer, then: he thought anew about those months, his own emotional weather in that interim, and what Jennie’s had been, quite independent of his imagining.
‘Together as in with the children? They kept remarkably quiet.’
‘I didn’t instruct them. Just asked them to go easy on me. I think the message got through. They’re wiser than we think.’
‘Okay, well, what else can I say, Jen? It would be an odd thing, wouldn’t it, if I didn’t assume you were a grown woman? Yeah, maybe you could have told me sooner, since it’s pertinent to the kids.’
‘Like I say, I didn’t know myself for a while.’
‘Yes, but you just said, you wish it had been sooner. You can do that, you know. Tell me things, I won’t break. Better that than any sort of subterfuge. The kids knowing things I don’t.’
Her sigh travelled down the line. ‘As you say, David, I’m a grown-up, we both are, we all need some kind of privacy. And in a house of children that’s not easy to come by. I mean, as if relationships weren’t hard enough, at our age – trying to make them, learning to trust someone and all of that. Trying to get over the inhibitions from the past …’
‘You mean inhibitions I put in you by the way I behaved, et cetera.’
‘No, David, honestly, I’m not talking about you, I’m just talking about me and this man. Nick … he has kids of his own from a marriage that failed. What I mean is, he gets that there’s a sensitivity to this situation. As do I. But, I dunno, you maybe think that’s all namby-pamby crap …’
‘Of course not, Jennie. Just, don’t think you ever have to handle me like porcelain … Look, thank you for telling me, and if this is a good thing for you, then great.’
‘Thank you, David, I appreciate that.’
‘The children – they get on with him okay?’
‘They’ve spent some time, enough, they get on. Yeah, he’s good with them. He’s a good man.’
‘Good. I suppose I’ll meet him.’
‘The camping trip I mentioned on Sunday. It’s … we’re all going together, so …’
‘Right, yeah, I knew there had to be a reason …’ And he laughed, extending the laugh to fill the space, so that nothing in his manner might sound hollowed, emptied, or otherwise impaired.
*
Well before his arrival in Gravesend Blaylock had lost all savour for the day’s business. En route he was advised that the National Statistics Office believed that the encouraging trends boasted by the day’s official police crime figures were ‘not credible’. Now he felt he was going through stage-managed motions. Even after collecting Richard Colls, who cheerily sported a lipstick-sized video camera affixed to his lapel – ‘I wore it for you, David’ – Blaylock’s mood was not improved.
They drove to a new-build garden estate of identical two-toned family homes, and on the street’s corner, in the estate community centre cum doctor’s surgery, Colls introduced him to a pillar of the community, a plump and silvery sixty-four-year-old named Deirdre.
‘When I was a girl this estate was a highly desirable address. Then it got so nobody wanted to be here. Oh, I tell you. It was bandit country. But the community decided they wouldn’t stand for it no more, they rallied round and organised to get something done.’
‘What made the difference?’ Blaylock eyed Chief Constable Colls.
‘Oh, the council deciding to knock the whole estate down. And build it back up good and proper. And, best of all, they didn’t let any of the bad families back in. Told ’em to sling it.’
This was a more drastic, expensive remedy than Blaylock had been planning to endorse.
Deirdre then accompanied him and Colls on a tour of the locale, dictating their pace as she walked with a stick. Blaylock was invited to peer very intently down a deserted pedestrian cut-through, at some fiercely chopped bushes around a church hall, and at a shiny, deserted playground – all places where, according to Deirdre, ‘the druggies used to loiter’.
Colls offered a commentary: ‘We got CCTV on the playground, we lit up the alley, wherever the gangs hung around we moved them on.’
Moved them on where? was the nagging question in Blaylock’s head.
Back at the centre they met Deirdre’s husband Maurice, stooped and bald as an egg, a cheery follower of current affairs. ‘You’re the bloke gave that car thief a clout? Good on you, son. I wish I could do that. But they’re not afraid of me …’
Patiently Blaylock began to extol his faith in restorative justice, keeping youths clear of the court syste
m, offering offenders a way to repair misdeeds. Neither Maurice nor Deirdre were madly keen.
‘That won’t work for the real troublemakers, the hard nuts, the bad families. They can be very large families, see. And if you get into a quarrel with one then you’ve a quarrel with the lot of ’em.’
‘Their parents go round sticking up for them, saying it’s everyone else’s fault … No, soft touch is the problem, bad parenting and that. I mean, you’re a parent, aren’t you, Mr Blaylock?’
Blaylock nodded and made a serious face, deciding not to offer himself as the acme of child-rearing virtue.
He and Colls drove on to ‘The Avenues’, a shabbier older estate of two-storey houses and staunchly maintained older person’s bungalows, over the road from a stretch of barren gated parkland. They pulled up outside a squat whitewashed property hemmed by a low wall, metal grilles across its windows, and a hand-painted awning that announced AVENUES COMMUNITY HUB. A cherry-red mobility scooter was parked by a closed garage where a man stood vigorously whitewashing some aerosol graffiti from the expanse of the metal door. He was introduced to Blaylock as Terry Beggs, the administrator of the premises.
‘What did it say on the wall?’ Blaylock asked. ‘You can tell me.’
Terry Beggs winced. ‘Uh, “Fuck Paddy Vaughan”?’
‘Right. Someone knew we were coming?’
In the snug main shop-space computer workstations were arranged round the walls. Terry explained carefully that the hub was a place to help the ‘digitally underprivileged’ get assistance with their searches for work and entitlements to benefit in the interim.
Out the back door where a young man was steering a grass strimmer round a scruffy square of lawn, Blaylock was introduced to Scott, who hadn’t shaved and wore his baseball hat low, but had zipped up his tracksuit top.
‘Scott got in bother, he did his service,’ Terry explained. ‘Now he runs our repairs team, it gets the young people involved in gardening and decorating and handy jobs round the community.’
Next in line was Roy, a lean white-haired sexagenarian who leaned on a metal-topped cane and whose handshake was exquisitely limp. Terry shouted to the strimmer – ‘Chris!’ – to down tools and come over.
‘So, Chris, here? He got in bother, got himself under the influence, nicked Roy here’s mobility scooter and pranged it. He didn’t have form, there were … circumstances. He knew he’d offended. His parents came in, it was made clear it could be criminal proceedings or restorative justice. And he chose the latter. So, we talked to Roy here, as the victim, would the process work for him? And now this is where we are.’
After a cogitative moment Blaylock weighed in. ‘So, Chris, how are you feeling now about this system and how you’ve been treated?’
‘S’alright. S’good, yeah? Better than court. I know now, see, Roy had problems and stuff? If I’d known how things was for him – and he’d known how it was for me – reckon we’d have got on.’
‘But you think it’s a good system, a fair system?’
‘Worked for me, mate. Not much else I can say.’
‘Right. And how’s your experience been, Roy?’
‘Well, as a form of punishment I’m glad at least there’s some disciplining aspect to it at the outset, that police are present and it gets thrashed out over a table …’ The refined flow of Roy’s speaking voice was interrupted by a barking cough that came out of Chris and made the older man grimace. ‘Of course, it’s hardly the Bloody Assizes. But, you have to try to get on with people in life is my credo. For a while I thought Chris’s voice was being heard more loudly than mine, and even now I’m not sure …’
Ben Cotesworth appeared at Blaylock’s shoulder. ‘The press are all ready for you out front, David.’
They all trooped back out front where the media had gathered, Blaylock folding some notes away in his pocket before the cameras got a look. He took up a position cleared for him in front of the newly whitewashed garage door.
‘Thank you for coming. Recorded crime is down once again, news for which we should be thankful, but I came here today to see for myself the reality of the street—’
Abruptly a great rumbling sound – the booming bass of dub reggae as from a big amplified system – rose up from the street.
‘You can run but you can’t hide,
You can run but you can’t hide …’
Heads turned in great consternation seeking the source of the sound. Then came gasps and laughter, and Blaylock realised eyes and cameras were pointing behind him, his police team suddenly bothered. He turned and beheld the white door, upon which words were materialising from the air in the form of dripping paint, as if by magic:
LYING TORY SCUM!
Blaylock saw young Chris had clapped a hand over his mouth, though his eyes shone. It was indeed a stunning prank. He moved hastily out of shot, even as the first words on the door erased themselves to be replaced by others:
YOU WILL BE CORRECTED!
That evening, as he sat in his study in semi-darkness before a laptop, nursing three fingers of Macallan, Blaylock took a call from a chastened-sounding Richard Colls.
‘The perpetrators got away through the park, David, but they had to dump the kit they’d been using, and we retrieved it. Basically it was handheld laser projection – like a laser graffiti gun? It was wired up to a laptop in a canvas bag, and a computer program did the animation bit so it looked like paint.’
‘Ingenious,’ muttered Blaylock, swilling his medicine round his glass tumbler.
‘So you know, there’s a mob online have claimed credit for it through social media. They’re called The Correctors, online is sort of where they seem to live. We’ve had some sight of them before at protests, demos and whatnot, that’s what they do – pranks and stunts and flash mobs, with that sort of anti-capitalist, anti-establishment angle. There’s a fair old archive of stuff related to them if you do a Google video search …’
Within minutes Blaylock sat clicking through YouTube sidebars. It was remarkably easy to find traces of his alleged tormentors, and their repertoire of sound and image felt remarkably familiar to him.
The most substantial piece of work he found started sharply, backed by a doom-laden score, with a quick-cut montage of what an inter-title called ‘callous, unfeeling elites’ – world leaders, bankers, other forms of grinning well-heeled scum. His pulse hardly jumped when his own face jumped out at him amid the blink-editing. Was he entering the Carlton Club a few weeks previous? It was all too brief.
The imagery changed to tumultuous scenes of visible poverty, streets reeling from bomb-blasts, glaring lines of police in riot gear. Then, consonant with a fade to black, came the kick of dub reggae, ushering in scenes of placard protesters, vociferous marchers, the dancing and jigging and grinning of passionate youth. A vox populi offered snatches of affirmative speech by an interchangeable succession of students, some of them masked.
Then, finally, something Blaylock saw and heard made him sit up.
‘Define The Correctors? I can’t do that … This is a movement, and that means – it moves, it doesn’t stand still. The Correctors are just a vehicle for ideas, and no one person is driving. No one can get in its way, either.’
The white translucent plastic mask had successfully anonymised the speaker’s face, but the halting conviction of his voice, not to say his sculpted crest of hair, would have been known anywhere by his father.
‘But there’s no logo, no platform, no tee-shirt … I just think what we’d say is that our ideas, our energies, are for the people, and against the neoliberal world order. The enemy is neoliberalism, and its ringleaders, and its apologists. We have to fight them. Their errors must be corrected.’
The piece concluded with a sequence of title-cards.
CORRECTION: THE REMOVAL OF ERROR.
CORRECTION: PUNISHMENT, THEN REHABILITATION.
CORRECTION: HOW SOCIETY DEALS WITH OFFENDERS.
THE PEOPLE ARE THE POLICE!
Blaylock poured and knocked back a second, short whisky. A powerful instinct told him to get on the phone to Jennie. Some other force, fractionally more compelling, told him that her view would not be his view, the outcome nothing like what he rightly or wrongly wished for.
Keep your powder dry, he told himself, pouring once more.
7
Dominic Moorhouse was aggrieved. And if the Foreign Secretary was not an imposing figure – rather, with the look of an outsized school debater, frowning under his big specs and waves of hair – he was straining to make himself forcefully clear to Blaylock.
‘The ambassador came to see me yesterday to express his extreme dissatisfaction over the revoking of this deportation order for Eve Mewengera? David, I’m struggling to understand what possessed you to undermine our position and cause us such a diplomatic embarrassment with a government whose friendship in the region is so significant to us. I mean … was somebody getting at you?’
‘I received demonstrations, yes, Dom. After I reviewed them I formed the opinion, whatever the realpolitik of the thing, that this woman just shouldn’t have to go back there.’
‘Right, and should we be prepared for your taking any more of these kinds of unilateral decisions, now you’ve opened the door?’
‘I really hope not, Dom. What I hope is that Ms Mewengera’s case is the exception I believe it to be. If it’s not, then what else would you expect from me?’
Patrick Vaughan, seated next to them in the position of adjudicator, was regarding Blaylock with one of his stock expressions of brow-creased botherment. ‘It is a bloody odd thing for you to have done, David.’
But Blaylock simply didn’t think the Captain cared enough. And for his own part he was growing weary of being hauled in early before Cabinet to account for himself like the errant schoolchild. Diane Cleeve was due in to see him later, and the requirement of best behaviour weighed heavily enough on him already.
The Knives Page 24