‘They may have very good reason to fear. They might get used to the reassurance the firearms bring.’
Blount smiled. ‘Officers, too, will be concerned for what’s put on them. That they become targets.’
‘Okay. I know that argument, that officers don’t want it. The public seem to, though. Myself, I don’t know. Belfast may have warped my view.’
‘We have armed response, maybe not enough of it. But London’s fine, the Midlands are fine … Okay, once you’re in Durham, Northumberland? Less so. People are rightly appalled. But these incidents are still so rare.’
‘What if the decision were down to you?’
Blount smiled wryly, looked aside for some moments, then back. ‘I was in Paris last summer? I did feel a certain assurance looking at the gendarmerie and their semi-automatics. Where policing has arisen from those paramilitary functions …? I could see the sense in a number of officers routinely carrying side-arms on patrol. Even just a Glock. But I sense the equipping and training will cost more than we have spare. Forgive me, than you have. I speak hypothetically.’
‘Maybe not so much. If a vacancy arose around here? For a permanent secretary? Would that interest you?’
Blount raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips, then slowly nodded.
*
That night at home Blaylock stood by his bedroom window, nursing a tumbler of whisky, gazing out onto the eerily serene square. The halos of the street-lamps cast light onto the Georgian brick terrace opposite, and put an illumined frame round the square, its long carpet of leaves hemmed by tall, gaunt sycamores and a low perimeter of chain-linked black iron bollards.
Blaylock felt that his prospects were renewed. He had not been killed, made a little stronger – maybe old Nietzsche had a point. Yet his spark was low.
The whisky he had poured he no longer fancied. Despite its allure he knew it to be a vulnerable anaesthetic, medicine to be taken, first in hope of an instant cure, then with a dull surety that the operation would take more time than one had factored for.
Madolyn Redpath had stung him again: ‘You bloody do act out of fear …’ He was certainly not confident – not unfearful – of the effectiveness of the machine he controlled. All he could see now was the monolithic rigidity, and curious inadequacy, of his habits of thought. Security, liberty – what did they mean, and how could he arbitrate over them? He had never understood liberty, for he had never believed in what freedom might achieve as much as what bondage prevented.
He heard the pulse of his phone from its place on the bedside table and went to retrieve it. It was Mark Tallis, earlier than usual.
‘Can you believe Gervaise Hawley? This is what the fucker has just tweeted. “The Home Secretary is looking tired, fraught, on edge after his recent strains. Genuinely worried for him.”’
‘Not a bad needle. Killing me with kindness.’
‘It’s out of order.’
‘Off, but not unexpected. I told you, Mark, don’t waste your time hunting down my critics on Twitter …’
He went back to the window, and instantly felt his breath catch. Under the trees near a bench was a man, hooded, leaning against a sycamore, looking up at him, albeit shadowy and out of the light cast from the lamppost. Something about the dark beard and trails of hair snaking from out of the hood registered – that, and the man’s dulled, distressed, demo-ready urban combat-wear.
Then the man turned and was moving at pace, across the square toward a narrow pedestrian-only outlet to the main road. It didn’t strike Blaylock as coincidence. This man had taken flight, for he had been watching, and had not cared to be seen.
5
He sat in the back of the parked car and studied the scene through the glass, at a decent remove from the fray, in the company of policemen and feeling himself to be not so unlike a policeman either. The focus of his gaze, a hundred or so feet ahead, was a close-penned sea of close-cut white heads: all male, mainly in bomber jackets and jeans, shuffling and smoking, a grim liveliness about them on a greyed-over Saturday afternoon. The gathering snaked away from sight but it consisted, Blaylock reckoned, of between three and four hundred bodies.
He had grown a tad fixated on one fellow at the periphery of the throng, clad in a fishtail parka and wraparound shades, phone pressed to his ear, as sour-faced as a secret service detail while his mates larked around him. A couple of mounted policemen sat high up on restive horses, looking down sternly on proceedings, a police car in front of them, a cordon of officers on foot at their back.
Then Blaylock shook his head sharply and blinked as if to sharpen his middle-aged vision – for he thought he had half-glimpsed, weaving amid the pack, a familiar figure in tweedy cap and coat. But finding his view obstructed he reached for the door handle.
‘Aw, now you musn’t leave the car, sir,’ said the Cleveland Police constable seated beside him. ‘Sorry, but – please.’
Andy grinned from his berth at the officer’s other flank. ‘Quite right.’
Blaylock sat back. ‘What would you do, arrest me?’
The officer grinned, touching the brim of his hat. ‘If I had to, sir.’
A raucous cheer from without reached the car and Blaylock looked to see a union flag being unfurled and raised above the demonstrators, just as the toll of a clock-tower bell rang through the air.
‘Okey-doke, that’s gone one,’ sighed the sergeant in the front passenger seat. ‘Take ’em to Missouri, Matt.’
The police car was moving off, the horses geed up behind, the cordon of officers following, and in their wake the congregation.
The sergeant leaned back to Blaylock. ‘Right, so they’re off down Pinstone Road, left on Neville Street and up Coulson Parade to the war memorial. And that’s where they’re stopping.’
Chants, which had risen from stray pockets of demonstrators before, now resounded clearly, born of football fandom in their blunt repetition, one slogan in quintuple time.
‘Eff-Bee, Eff-Bee-Bee! Eff-Bee, Eff-Bee-Bee!’
‘Eng-land! ’Til I die! Eng-land! ’Til I die!’
‘Our country! Our streets! Our country! Our streets!’
‘Let’s be getting you to the Town Hall, sir,’ murmured the sergeant.
*
Thornfield, if not a beauty spot, was nonetheless to Blaylock’s eye a perfectly presentable northern town. But he knew he might think different were it not for the Town Hall. Set amid the depredations of the high street, but on a central island serenely apart from the haberdashers and the credit union and the takeaway pasty shops, this Georgian redbrick building projected just enough residual civic pride – just enough faded grace in its clock tower and belfry, its pantiled roofs and leaded windows – to improve all else in the environs.
Within the council chamber Blaylock found a big union flag had been fastened across the wood-panelled back wall and Pachelbel’s Canon was being piped at sufficient volume to echo round the space. A queue of applicants – some sober-suited, some in florid national dress – were having their names ticked off by a registrar then adjourning to be snapped by camera phones as they stood by an easel holding up a pleasant photo of the Queen. But Blaylock’s eyes were drawn to a pint-sized Indian girl-child in a sari, whose big watchful eyes and mop of dark curls delighted him. He made conversation with the child’s mother – a nurse named Aparna – largely so that he had an excuse to lift little Gitti up into his arms.
Presently the Mayor called proceedings to order: Blaylock hoped he would be the soul of brevity, having never, ever, in all his days heard a mayor speak well. After seven or eight minutes in paean to the welcoming environment of Thornfield, and the obvious virtues of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and how much he, as Mayor, personally loved to eat the fiery native cuisines of all of these places – he at last invited Blaylock to make ready for the handing out of framed certificates of naturalisation.
The inductees followed the registrar in solemn recitation: ‘I will
give my loyalty / To the United Kingdom / and respect its rights and freedoms / I will uphold its democratic values …’
Names were called, people moved forward, Blaylock shook their hands and murmured pleasantries – with Mr Elmadi from Sudan, and Mr Diatezua from the DRC. After a brisk bellow through the national anthem the business was done, and Blaylock accepted a cup of tea and a sandwich, posing cheerily with his new fellow citizens in front of the Queen and the flag.
‘So we have a nice letter from you,’ Aparna smiled at him, and Gitti thrust a page upward for his inspection. Nonplussed for a moment, he then saw his passport-size portrait next to his Home Office letterhead and remembered approving this ‘Welcome to the UK’ boilerplate. If these things had seemed perfunctory before, he was feeling buoyed by the unfussy pleasantness of this occasion. It occurred to him that his native northeast of England probably needed all the highly motivated and well-mannered newcomers it could get.
His ear picked up on the crackle of a police radio and some sotto voce exchanges; then he watched the grave constable draw nigh.
‘Sir, could I possibly have a private word in the corridor?’
Blaylock had guessed the matter and beckoned Andy Grieve to come out with him.
‘We’ve had a bit of bother with the FBB march? Some of the marchers, they’ve splintered off and got past our cordons, it looks like they’re making in this direction. Actually looks to have been planned like that …’
Blaylock nodded and let himself be led to a stairwell with a long-window hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the surrounding streets. The first sight he clocked was that of yellow-jacketed police, regrouped for action in riot gear, helmets with visors and sticks in hand.
Then he saw white heads, a posse of bomber jackets and jeans, all barrelling out of a narrow alleyway into the lower end of the square and stomping across the piazza toward the Town Hall. A bottle was tossed, and it shattered in the dead space of the paving; and then another, as the marauders pressed forward.
‘We’ll have to hold tight,’ muttered the constable.
‘What, like Fort Apache?’ Blaylock shot back.
Dozens upon dozens were thickening into a crowd, all truculence and tattoos and branded tee-shirts, a sea of pointing and chanting, some with arms spread wide as if declaring their love of a ruck, others with phones aloft, capturing the moment.
‘Eff-Bee, Eff-Bee-Bee!’
Those on the frontline before the riot police made challenges with stuck-out chests, some adorned by three lions. Cameramen ducked and weaved between them as if in a war zone.
‘The country’s full! Fuck off home! The country’s full! Fuck off home!’
‘This is deteriorating fast, boss.’ Andy took Blaylock’s arm. ‘We need to get you out of here.’
Indeed Blaylock saw yellow jackets jogging up the stairs toward them. He looked back to the door of the oblivious council chamber.
‘We go all together, that’s the only way. We need paddy wagons fronted up here and we need to get these people safely out, right?’
‘Sir, I can’t say we can—’
‘It’s what we’re doing. Tell your Chief Constable if you like. But get in the chamber and tell our new citizens calm as you can that we’re all going to make an emergency exit under police guard.’
*
He stayed by the window until he saw the chequered vans back up as close as they could to the officers manning the hall’s rear exit, whereupon he joined the small group of inductees in the corridor, and noted with a pang just how much panic was in their eyes. He felt purpose, and rising adrenals. The yellow jackets formed up in a protective wedge around them.
‘Everyone ready?’
He heard a thin wail and turned to see Aparna stooped and holding Gitti’s face in her hands. He made an executive decision and, for the second time in the day, scooped the girl up into his arms.
The door into daylight was thrown open and they made the big push, Blaylock near the rear but aware Andy and Aparna were behind him. The mob was alarmingly close, barely cordoned by officers with sticks, but the sanctuary of the vans was only forty feet away.
‘Move back! Stay back!’ the officers shouted at the mob. But there was hard jostling, jeering and spittle in the air, and Blaylock was met by red-faced close-quarter exhortations to a fight.
‘Blaylock! You fuckin’ disgrace!’
‘Be a fuckin’ man and come owa here, ye!’
‘Cunt! You cunt!’
He heard a cry and turned to see Aparna stumble, but Andy had her. He turned back to see a great bullet-headed lump of a man who had bullied through the police line and was now lunging at him. With the hand not clasping Gitti he gave his attacker a stiff-armed fend-off straight to the face. In the next instant he was lifting Gitti into the van, Aparna was being shoved into his back, and Andy slammed the door.
‘We’re clear, go, go, go!’
The van was being pilloried from all sides but it grumbled and lurched and at last they were away and off the piazza at speed. Blaylock looked behind him – at officers using both hands to shove back the protesters, some bare-chested in November, and yet still they came. One was strutting across the square in some alcoholic rapture, his narrow chest swathed by the flimsiest flag of St George, but evidently savouring the sweetest of afternoons.
He heard Gitti calmly tell her sobbing mother that she was okay. And so, clearly, were they all.
6
‘The coverage is pretty good, I’d say, patrón. After the week you’ve had, I guess the sum of it is – there’s nobody quite like you …’
Blaylock was back in the Jaguar, having travelled back to London on a late train the previous night, now en route to the Captain’s rural summit – policy, direction, prospects for the next election – hosted at his Dorset home. Jaded and pensive, he was content to listen to Mark Tallis exulting over the papers.
‘Even the fucking Correspondent has gone all “He-said, She-said”. “Is Blaylock a liability? Or do we need more of his sort in politics?” I mean, a poll in The Times says thirty-one per cent still think you should quit but there’s an Observer op-ed saying you ought to be leader.’
‘At least it’s only them …’
He had made some front pages, but the various messy snaps of his mercy dash from Thornfield Town Hall all seemed to catch him in a fair light. His high praise for Cleveland Police was widely reported. The Mirror liked the scathing judgement he had delivered on the FBB. (‘What do this shower have to say to the honest, hard-working local people of this area?’) It seemed to him one of the better things he had done lately. Again he could not but feel that hitting someone – so long as it was the right one – was something he ought to do more often.
They reached Corfe, a grey stone village under a blue-wash sky, replete with church and market square, nestled under the watch of a ruined medieval castle and a whaleback ridge of hills. The Jaguar zipped past a row of ceramic shops and a pub that, at lunch-hour, spilled out with a discernible mix of locals and Londoners. It was unmistakably Sunday, steeped in the special torpor of rural life and England’s upper middle class. He had come to a corner of England that was true blue – just as the Prime Minister was, just as Blaylock was not.
*
Stepping over the threshold into the Captain’s country kitchen Blaylock was met by an aroma of fresh-ground coffee and by Vaughan, in the midst of slathering two legs of lamb with a gloop of garlic and rosemary, wiping hands slippery with olive oil onto a black apron as he came over.
‘David, how often is it that I’m shaking your hand like you’ve just returned from battle?’
Glancing past the Captain Blaylock clocked the cohort for the afternoon – just him, Dominic Moorhouse, Caroline Tennant, and the Captain’s usual coterie, the Etonian–Oxonian clan who directed the daily Downing Street meetings Blaylock never attended.
His out-of-place-ness was underscored by the others’ casual dress code of denims and good shirts. Even the indefatigably so
ignée Caroline Tennant wore jeans with her white silk blouse. Blaylock – suited, though tieless – cringed at how programmatic his life had become, that the suit was simply what he had pulled, unthinking, out of his wardrobe.
They sat round a long, heavy oak table across from the kitchen island, set with blue glass bottles of fizzy water and pots of that potent coffee. Blaylock decided to slough off his discomfort: he had earned his place at the table, he could call himself a survivor.
Al Ramsay presented the latest polls: the government ahead on providing leadership and a strong economy, trailing on protecting the NHS and knowing the price of a pint of milk. ‘“Out of touch”, I don’t buy it,’ Vaughan muttered. Blaylock feared the whole session might be a brow-furrowed stare at this set of numbers. But it wasn’t long before Vaughan steered them to his personal reading of them.
‘The big theme’, Vaughan asserted, ‘just needs to be security, no? Trust us. Competence. Yes, we don’t want to neglect transforming people’s life chances and all of that stuff. But things are a bit dicey, so for a while at least we need people to be a bit more hard-headed.’
Today Blaylock was unusually conscious of Vaughan’s remarkable calm, perhaps because all week long he’d had reason to be glad of it. The Captain seemed never truly to agonise: he made a decision, guided by the heads he trusted, then he moved on, however unsteadily. His confidence didn’t appear feigned; it came from some real place, not merely the offspring of privilege. For all that life had been good to him, Vaughan, though not pronouncedly churchy, seemed to exude some Anglican conviction that life was not all – that ‘all’, in fact, was vanity and vexation of spirit, the world far from perfect, but a Tory government, at least, was the world turned right side up, and so the job was to keep winning and stumble onward. It was not the ‘radicalism’ Deborah Kerner urged upon Blaylock; yet it seemed altogether more effective.
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