The Knives

by Richard T. Kelly

  Blaylock’s ‘off-line’, ‘bilateral’ conversations had a degree of candour, at least. The Spanish Minister, Gonzalez, balding and pugnacious, seemed as vexed as he by security in major transport hubs. Karl Giesler privately shared his woes about campus recruitment and radicalisation among German-born Muslims of foreign descent. ‘Our great problem’, Giesler sighed, ‘is a conflict of systems from state to state, data not shared. If we had a total-system solution …’

  ‘That’s what I think ID cards can do,’ Blaylock nodded fiercely.

  But Giesler shook his head, with a look suggestive of wisdom dearly bought. ‘In Germany? That notion is … no. Not acceptable.’

  *

  Before he could return to the hotel he was ushered toward a small gaggle of bored journalists to give a compulsory briefing. But he saw Abigail among them and felt his heart lift. She stood tall in strappy high-heeled sandals, svelte in a wrap-round red dress, her golden bob lustrous under light and her green eyes sending out their darkly amused allure. He sensed her eyes on him as he delivered boilerplate remarks.

  ‘We are not alone in Europe. Anyone with eyes can see the shared concerns. Of course there are differences, but compromise is doable …’

  He was meant to have dinner with Roebuck and the team. Excuses were unconscionable, and he made it through two of four courses, before affecting a look so profoundly dark in pleading the pressure of work that he managed to secure an ‘early night’. Once inside his room he texted her again, telling himself that he was only flesh and blood, however aged and non-vintage.

  Would you like to meet for a drink?

  I suppose we could get round to that:) Where do I find you!?

  Room 237, just knock. Is 10 p.m. okay?

  There remained a ticklish matter to negotiate, and so he rapped on the partition door. Andy Grieve admitted him to the adjoining bedroom. On previous excursions they had shared a late whisky around this hour, and Blaylock felt a vague embarrassment in explaining that he would shortly have a social visitor.

  ‘Happy to stand down, boss,’ said Andy with a little mischief in his grin. ‘I reckon you’ll be in safe hands.’

  *

  ‘Here we are again,’ she said, slipping out of her smart jacket and setting her bag down on the table. ‘We must stop meeting in fancy hotel rooms.’

  ‘Slightly more illustrious than Birmingham,’ he said, pouring wine for her and whisky for him, sitting opposite her. ‘Though, as ever, be aware there’s a man with a gun next door.’

  ‘Yes, I do find that strangely heightening.’

  They exchanged looks and took sips.

  ‘What should we talk about?’ she said finally.

  ‘There’s not a great deal to bite on here, I admit. Sir Michael grinds the organ, I’m just the monkey. Do you absolutely need a story?’

  ‘It’s not really why I came.’ She put her face in her hand and gave him a sending look. ‘Cards on the table, I’ve been thinking about you.’

  He returned her gaze with what he thought to be gravitas and raised his whisky to his lips, but somehow missed them, thus spattering his chin and shirtfront.

  ‘Christ, forgive me,’ he muttered as he dabbed at himself with his tie. ‘I must just be feeling a little … over-stimulated.’

  Her look hardly changed, only softened by amusement. ‘I knew you weren’t the usual politician, but I am starting to wonder if you’re actually some kind of a monk?’

  This did feel to him, gallingly, like one more cap that fitted, albeit at this given moment more regrettably than ever. ‘You’d be amazed’, he managed, ‘the things you can conquer by not thinking about them.’

  ‘Yes, they call it denial.’ She straightened and set down her glass. ‘Look, I will probably find it a little … awkward, if I have to extend myself too much further in your direction? Maybe I should withdraw – sensible girl that I am. If I hurry out now I might still get a decent look at the statue of the Peeing Boy.’

  She picked up her bag and stood. He stood too, quickly, and moved to intercept her, then, anxious that he was showing all the delicacy of a nightclub doorman, took some care in gently prising her bag from her hands and returning it to the table. Then he put his hands round her waist and bent to kiss her mouth and saw her mirroring him, lips parting, eyes closing.

  Though their kiss had urgency, he sensed that she felt as he did – still somehow constricted by something other than mere clothing, as though they were actually clad in opposing armours. He led her by the hand to the bed then hastened to whisk the long curtains together, though the pulley system fought him for some vexing moments. When he turned back she had sat herself on the bed and begun to undress, efficiently. He turned aside to strip off himself, struggling only to think of where to put his trousers.

  Turning back he saw her laughing lightly, already down to bra and knickers, and then, rising, she unclasped the bra and threw it lightly to the floor, a gesture he found hugely helpful to his mood. He realised now how stylishly she adorned herself in what she wore since, unclad, her broad hips, curved biceps and shallow breasts had an athletic, gym-honed solidity. Still, the aureate flush on her from head to toe was heavily arousing as she swayed across the parquet toward him.

  ‘The undies are all new, just so you know …’

  This, said in a girlish murmur, also went straight to his blood, likewise her light touch of his chest and the longing brush of her cheek against his. As they made love he felt sure the urgency on her face mirrored his own, echoed his urge to make good, that their coupling would prove the flirtation had been worth the candle. She crossed her ankles at his back and he exulted in the sensation of being high inside her, snugly sheathed, welcomed home again.

  *

  They must have drifted off together, and such was the expanse of the bed that when Blaylock stirred with a start just after 2 a.m. he needed some moments to locate her shape more than a body’s length away from him beneath the cotton sheets. But he had no intention of sending her out into the night, whatever was her preference. Fumblingly he set the bedside alarm for 5 a.m.

  Waking first, he shifted up onto a crooked elbow and studied her honeyed shoulders, the nape of her neck, her hair on the pillow. Abruptly, oddly, he remembered times when Cora had crept into his and Jennie’s bed, Jennie quite often clearing out to fall onto Cora’s narrow cot. He had always loved to watch his daughter awaken – innocent, in a way it seemed to him that no one could be so innocent again. He peered closely now at Abigail’s auburn roots, until she rolled over, wincing slightly, stirring. Blaylock was keenly aware he would keep the memory to himself, since he also divined what Abigail was about to say before she opened her mouth.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Just how lovely you are.’

  She dressed while he shaved, and as she made to go he looked at her fondly from head to toe, superbly assembled, if just a tad more tousled than usual. Will I see you again? was what he thought he might say, but he judged it unwise. He stepped forward, embraced her strongly, kissed the top of her head, stepped back and smiled.

  ‘Will I see you again?’ she said.

  ‘I’d like that. If you like, this weekend, I could show you Teesside.’

  9

  The humdrum assignations of Blaylock’s constituency Friday had a fresh appeal to him in anticipation of what the evening promised. After lunch he busied approvingly through a local school, previously under special measures, now sorted out by a new head. He chatted freely with A-level history students, listened to a brass instrument recital, posed with a school football shirt.

  By dusk he was in his constituency office being taken through the order of the next day’s surgery by Chloe, the intern, who seemed to be slowly mastering the rudiments of the job. Bob Cropper, plotting his larger media grid, impressed on him the need to accept an invitation to an upcoming ‘citizenship ceremony’ at Thornfield Town Hall, where he would present certificates to newly confirmed British citizens.

  �
��They’ll all have passed their language test’, said Bob, ‘plus their little history exam on what it means to be British. And I’m not sure all our constituents could do the same. Not always certain I could, frankly.’

  Blaylock didn’t think twice. He knew he ought to be there, though he could imagine not everyone would be pleased to see him.

  ‘We done?’ he asked, slapping his thighs.

  *

  On the way back to Maryburn he mulled over the hopeful stir he felt inside, uniquely odd to him given the time of year – the true autumn of All Hallows and Bonfire Night, in its fecundity and decay, its slow-stripped branches and slatternly leaves. Usually these put him in mind of the sand in the hourglass. Now the quickening possibilities of a new relationship had changed the picture.

  The Maryburn house had come to feel like a lair, the dwelling of a private creature with rough manners. In the time he had before Abigail’s arrival Blaylock tried some remedial work. He raked wet leaves, slashed the hedges into shape, changed his bedsheets and mopped his bathroom floor, then called on the grocer and the butcher and filled a box with best silverside, aromatic herbs and spicy Syrah.

  Not long after 9 p.m. he saw headlights flare on the driveway and she purred up in her purplish Lexus cabriolet. He padded out into the dark to steer her into a berth within his garage and as he drew down the door he had the feeling of a mission accomplished.

  Their hello kiss was long; he felt the soft impress of her tongue, and the warmth of her body through her black trouser suit. He finished off the meal while she read an old paperback entitled The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, her legs curled cosily beneath her. To his delight she ate red meat with brio, mopped bleeding juices with bread, and knocked back red wine without a jot of demurral.

  Over coffee, his red box open between them on the low table, he took care to say little of its contents, considering her not yet fully cleared for such confidences. Still, he found himself describing at length his unsettling encounter with Diane Cleeve. Abigail listened intently, with a studious tilt of her head and the odd thoughtful pull on her earring.

  He felt easier drawing some family background out of her. She referred to a younger sister, married to some charmless hedge funder and raising twins in a Twickenham house ‘like a vicarage’. Her college contemporaries, as she evoked them, were increasingly married with children, ‘boring on about school catchments and house prices’. She assured him that she, conversely, had a driving need to meet new people and new ideas, to play in larger playgrounds.

  He asked her politely what she was working on. She described a longish piece in the works about predictive science. ‘That’s more interesting to me than trying to tap MPs for quotes.’

  She rises above it, he thought, she can take it or leave it, she knows there’s more to this world.

  ‘Someday soon you’ll have to tell me who told you all these mean things in the piece you did on me.’

  ‘Nuh-uh,’ she smiled. ‘Impossible. Then I’d have to kill you. Or, sorry, have you killed.’

  When his phone pulsed on the table he meant to give it only the most cursory look in light of the hour. But it was Adam Villiers. He excused himself and went into the kitchen.

  ‘David, it’s a matter of some urgency. Haseeb Muthana’s wife gave birth this morning, an hour ago he spoke to her by a satellite phone, and we have a fix on his whereabouts. We have it thanks to Washington. Where Muthana is, whether by coincidence or design, is in a compound in Babur Ghar being used by a leading Pakistani Taliban commander whose name is Gul Sayid. It’s clear from what I understand that the Americans are not about to hesitate now they have such a high-value target in sight.’

  ‘They’re planning to hit the compound from the air?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Blaylock stared out into the darkness beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass of his kitchen. He thought about Haseeb Muthana, his wife and newborn child, the revolving eye in the sky now trained dispassionately upon him, the power to kill in the joystick-grasping hand of an operative somewhere in the Nevada desert.

  ‘David …?’

  ‘I mean, there’s nothing to be done at our side, is there, Adam?’

  ‘That’s my view. But I wanted you to be aware, David. Also I believe Caleb Aldrich may call you shortly.’

  Sure enough, Blaylock was still tapping his phone ruminatively when it pulsed again.

  ‘David, you’re briefed on Sayid? I’m aware you got a passport holder in the mix of this, but the window’s closing on these co-ordinates and I gotta say we can’t guarantee anyone in the vicinity’s gonna be walking out of there …’

  It seemed a long way back to the room. In the event Abigail came down the hallway toward him.

  ‘David …? Are you okay?’

  He thought for some moments, abruptly recalling that she had once been keen to know if he had ever killed a man.

  ‘Sorry, it’s not really discussable.’

  She nodded, seeming to understand. He was comparing her to Jennie, without wishing to. And Jennie was a sort of living reprimand. With Abigail, though, he chose to believe there was a shared sense of the world’s moral murk.

  They embraced under the cool clean sheets and he could have settled for that, troubled as he was and with wine taken, but she clambered on top of him, made the running, and he was carried along and energetically worked. Finally she fell on him, and he stroked her head and let her fine hair pour through his fingers.

  In the night he awoke sharply and in fright from an obscurely menacing dream, feeling as though the bed were shaking violently beneath him. He slammed back against the mattress as if to evade his fate; but in an instant the silence and darkness all around him reasserted their sway.

  *

  Saturday morning surgery was at the office, and as his last-but-one appointment failed to show he slipped out to the caff to stretch his legs and wolf down a bacon roll. On his return young Chloe advised that his 11 a.m., Mr Peter Ayrton, was already seated in the meeting room.

  The gentleman at the scuffed round table was fiftyish, in a smart tweedy coat, blue jeans, scarf and flat cap, like a veteran rock ’n’ roller turned country squire. He stood as Blaylock entered, hand outstretched.

  ‘Mr Ayrton?’

  ‘Pete’s my mate, actually, David. Forgive me, I gave his name. But I’m Duncan Scarth, pleased to meet you, we very nearly met before?’

  Blaylock, digesting this information, elected not to take Scarth’s hand, debating instead how badly he should react.

  ‘I take it, but, that you know who I am? My job’s in bricks and mortar but I’m also the co-executive director of the Free Briton Brigade.’

  ‘It’s not on, this. Coming in here under false pretences.’

  ‘Well, I doubt you’d have seen me otherwise, would you, David? For all that you’re my MP.’

  ‘Come off it, round here’s not home to you.’

  ‘I bounce about a bit, but this is where I’m from, and I’ve a place in Maryburn just like you. Now look, I’m not here to cause you bother. Otherwise I’d have gate-crashed one of your little sessions at the shopping centre. I’ve got some concerns, but. About how the policies of your government are affecting ordinary folk round these parts.’

  ‘You’re a spokesman for them, are you?’

  ‘I’ve a little bit of a following behind me, yes, David. I know we’re easily scorned. I’m aware it gets said we’re a racist party? Point of fact, we judge no man on the colour of his skin. What we want is a decent democratic society, everyone respecting its laws and its freedoms. They say we’re anti-Muslim? Not a bit of it. But we oppose Islamism, because it’s anti-democratic. Now, is that so bad? Does that mean ye and me can’t have us a civil conversation, as MP and constituent?’

  Blaylock lowered himself into a seat. Scarth did likewise, loosening his scarf, his cap jauntily in place.

  ‘Go on then. You’ve got fifteen minutes.’

  Scarth sniffed. ‘Fair do’s. So, I l
isten closely to all what you say, David. I don’t see we’re so far apart.’

  ‘Your FBB leaflets say different.’

  ‘Eh, I don’t sign off every draft. There’s a range of opinion in our group. Listen, I cheered every word you said at Tory Conference. And on the telly the other week, with that daft little girl, the civil liberties gasbag? Trying to make out like you’re a relic in your own country … I get that, too. It baffles me. I don’t want the bloody 1950s back, I wasn’t around, man. It’s the future what bothers me. How do we live together? Make things fair? So we happily pay wor taxes for all what we need?’

  Blaylock listened fretfully, wanting not common ground but clear blue water between himself and this man. He saw, though, as Scarth leaned forward, that a ‘but’ was on its way.

  ‘Thing is, David, then we see them immigration figures, rising all the time, and we have to ask, is it not just talk? When nothing ever changes? Answer me this, how did you get on in Brussels this week? Did you do anything to stop the flow of foreigners into this country?’

  ‘I had good exchanges with our European counterparts. My commitment is clear, they agree we need to work together to—’

  ‘Howay man, spare us that politician’s talk. Did you or did you not get owt out of them?’

  ‘My sense, Mr Scarth, is that nothing would be adequate for you. I don’t get the feeling you want us to have anything to do with Europe?’

  ‘You’re such a big fan of it, are you?’

  ‘I believe this country has a place in Europe, whatever the shortcomings of the arrangement. And you?’

  ‘Free Briton Brigade’s not anti-Europe, David. We’re a pan-European organisation, we’ve good comrades in Holland, Austria, the Baltics, in France. They don’t mess about, the French. They know they’re a nation, proud of their identity, their heritage, their culture. What we have in common is, one, we’s believe in our own sovereignty and, two, we’re not buying any fake idea of a greater Europe. As you well know, Europe is only the start of the bloody problem … Why have you got all the African lads piling up at Calais to cross into us, not stopping in Germany and Norway? Plenty jobs there, decent wages …’ Scarth had been patting his pockets a while and now produced a tobacco pouch.