The Knives (23 page)

Madolyn looked at him askance. ‘Do you ever turn down an MI5 request for surveillance?’

‘Yeah. Of course I do. It’s a question of resources and sometimes my instinct is it’s not right. But mainly the security services are very meticulous in identifying a threat, and I take it seriously because the public expect me to, and you would take it seriously, too, if you were in my chair.’

‘Next he’ll tell us that he walks the walls at night so the rest of us can sleep in our beds … Every Home Secretary tries that line, that only he really understands how big the terror threat is, so all us little people should just take his word for it and shut up.’

‘It’s not so simple. With the wisdom of hindsight, sure, every decision is clear. But when you have to assess developing situations … quite often every option is equally unappealing. The point is, we are obliged to act, otherwise people will rightly suppose we couldn’t make a decision, didn’t have the nerve for it. And nerve is what’s expected of us. Now, I respect the integrity of civil liberties campaigners, but it seems to me that it leads by logic to a position where one can argue that the price of liberty could be a bomb going off on our streets. And let’s not kid ourselves about what a hard ask that is. Do we ask the general public to pay that price? Would you or I?’

The room was subdued, a mere smattering of applause, but Blaylock was hopeful he had disconcerted at least a few among them.

Afterward, as they stood having their lapel mics unclipped, Madolyn showed every intention of extending the quarrel.

‘It’s tough for you, I see that, I don’t know how we can build your Jerusalem until we’ve all got chips implanted under our skin, right?’

‘Sure, that’s what I dream of, Madolyn, the UK as one big infra-red grid, like a web that twitches with every tremor.’

‘And you at the centre like a big fat spider. Do you never feel like a fraud?’

‘Say again?’

‘Do you ever just feel like you’re an actor on a stage? Do you actually understand what you say might have consequences? About more than just your career and keeping your party in power?’

‘Oh Christ, now you’re being offensive, you might as well have brought your bloody cuffs if you planned to dog me round all night.’

She thrust a torn envelope at me. ‘Will you read this? It’s a letter Eve wrote to me. She’d be appalled to think I’d shown it to you but, really, I don’t know what else to do. She’s due to be put on a flight at Heathrow on Sunday night, leaving 8 p.m. If it makes any difference to you.’

He shrugged resignedly. ‘You can be sure I’ll give it a look.’

‘Care or don’t care, just don’t pretend you care.’

Back at home he extracted from the envelope and unfolded a curled and blotted sheet of lined paper written in a careful hand. He sat on the edge of his bed and read.

Blaylock stood, enveloped by gloom, and set the letter down carefully on top of his bed. He went to his bedroom window and gazed out at the square below. Though the glass was armoured, Andy’s perennial advice was that Blaylock should not offer himself to the assassin’s sights. There were times when he wanted to dare as much.

Rain streaked the pane, the square below was in darkness but for the halos of lamps, the streets sodden and deserted. The moon above was hopelessly muddied by the miserable night. He pressed his brow up against the chill glass, the bulletproof border separating him from the blackness.

He was required to be overseer and defender of a system that sorted and processed individuals in this way. The charges thrown at him of indifference – he understood them, he felt the reproof. But the price of a change of heart weighed heavy – easier, for sure, to look away, to ‘hide behind procedure’, even if there was no place to hide from himself.

He was en route to his constituency by the early train when Jennie called him, sounding untypically helpless, and his heart lifted. Overnight an unkempt wisteria tree had buckled and half-fallen outside the front door of her mother Bea’s cottage in Barnard Castle, and Bea was struggling to cross her own doorstep, hoping the tree might yet be saved, but having no luck in stirring up a local tree surgeon.

Blaylock understood at once. Jennie’s father had passed away five years before, her sister now lived in New Zealand, Bea’s more helpful neighbours were ageing, too. The situation added up to a burden of guilt for Jennie, with her workload and the children. She needed someone with whom she could share it; and Blaylock was very content to be called upon. He anticipated an honest job of work that might amount to more than its own reward. He assured Jennie that he and Andy would call round to Bea’s in the late afternoon and do the business.

Per Vaughan’s demand, Blaylock gave the morning to escorting Jason Malahide round his patch. Together they visited the Port of Tees, donning high visibility jackets and hard-hats, peering respectfully around the premises of a maker of transoceanic fibre-optic cables, a biomass renewable energy producer and a colossal petrochemical cracker plant. Malahide was high-tempo, pointing and enquiring with the chief execs, managing both to speak quickly and ebulliently then to listen and nod with equal intensity. Amid the perpetual motion it was, Blaylock thought, quite impossible to guess what the man really thought.

Their respective bag-carriers made a buffer of sorts, and Malahide had to be on his way before lunch, but as they zipped to the train station
à deux
in Blaylock’s car it was obvious they would have to converse, as much as Blaylock sought to distance himself by gazing out at the royal blue edifice of the Transporter Bridge over the Tees, rising above the drab industrial riverfront with a kind of penny-plain poetry.

‘The northeast … It doesn’t change, does it?’

‘Excuse me?’ Blaylock turned to see Malahide affecting ruefulness.

‘I mean, that’s a lovely old port we just saw, but what’s it for? Shipping in bits of prefab kit to get screwed together. The trouble with this region, it’s still looking to the same old ways of making its living. I get no feel up here of any respect for entrepreneurs, risk-takers? Just people thinking their money’s in the taxpayer’s pocket, when it’s customers they need.’

‘That’s a partial view, I’d say.’

‘Fine. But where’s the digital quarter round here? Where’s the university lab doing innovative stuff in life sciences?
That’s
where you should have taken me, David. Less metal-bashing, more key-punching.’

‘Next time, then, Jason.’

‘Ha, right. But, listen, it was good to get a look at where you come from. What’s made you the curious fellow you are. You’re aware of your singularity, right?’

‘As a northeast Tory? Yup. I couldn’t miss it.’

‘It’s more than that. There are enough posh Northumbrians, still a few geriatric Thatcherites. But you have something else – that thing of being the people’s man? This party always has a role for someone who sounds like they could be that. Right now it’s you, David. Don’t get me wrong, I know what you’re really like, which is, clearly, a bit of a cunt.’

Blaylock nearly had to laugh at the heedlessness of it. Instead
he said, ‘That’s not very collegiate of you, now is it?’

‘Oh come on – you connive, you play the game, set people up, you’ve got your foot-soldiers. It’s okay. You can be yourself with me.’

‘You, of course, are a saint.’

‘I don’t say my hands are clean. But I don’t pretend, not like you. I’m not in knots that way. It’s why I don’t really see you as competition.’

‘I am not a threat to your … ambitions, Jason.’

‘I know you’re not, but I think you’d like to be. I don’t see you in the frame, though, David. I get why you impress a few people, but I see your limitations. Where’s your base support on the backbenches? Your so-called common touch maybe gets you a few admiring columns from the broadsheets and their readers, who’d never vote Tory in a million years … And ID cards are going to do for you with that lot, I’m afraid.’

They had pulled up into the station car park, and Malahide’s entourage were already on the steps. Malahide shot Blaylock a look so well pleased that it nearly invited a sock to the jaw. Blaylock merely clapped his shoulder.

‘Thanks for coming. I’m glad we had this talk.’

He and Andy stopped by the Maryburn house where they donned old clothes, Blaylock loaning his bodyguard a spare pair of denims and a shirt, since they were similarly sized; while from his neglected garage Blaylock retrieved wire and shears, bolts and a drill, and his dependable twelve-foot ladder. Then they drove up through sunlit Durham to Bea’s pensioner’s cottage in Barnard Castle, where, in the manner of the fairy tale, they cut a path through stooped and clinging boughs to her door. Bea let them know – in her reticent fashion, never knowingly in anyone’s debt – that she was glad they had come. She made tea and when Blaylock asked after her health, she replied, ‘I’ve been better.’

In Bea’s company Blaylock was reminded that Jennie was the apple who fell not far from the tree. Bea had been marked for marriage and motherhood like every girl in her class of 1960 but instead had gone to college and carved a career for herself as a radio producer and Mother of Chapel. He had known her to be formidable, always good in a crisis: it was typical, in a way, that she had beaten cancer by chemotherapy and stoicism, then buried her husband the next year, without falling apart as Blaylock believed he would have done in her place. Now she managed alone, defiantly, still driving herself about, still dressing herself smartly. But she moved unsteadily now, her hair had grown back ash-grey, the once-taut lines of her square face appeared gaunt. Her eyes, still startlingly pale blue, had lost their old sense of fast mooring.

As she enquired politely about Westminster business he hastened to drain his tea. ‘Better crack on while we have the light.’

He and Andy lopped the worst of the tangled branches, heaved up the tree and nestled it atop a privet; then they measured, drilled holes, sunk bolts, and clipped and twisted at long wires until the wisteria trunk was snugly re-fixed against the brickwork by the bay window. As they struggled to artistically ‘train’ a few straggly boughs Bea came to the doorstep with a critical look and issued a few directives.

In truth, she seemed as pleased as Blaylock had ever seen her. Back when he had courted Jennie, Bea had appeared to approve of him without fuss, by a nod of the head; ten years later she had disapproved of him, quite decisively, in much the same manner. After he had assured her it had been the simplest of errands and she had waved them away down Darlington Road, he was heartened to think that here was one sober judge who had ruled he was not such a bad man. From the road he called Jennie to confirm the job was done, and she, too, was unusually, gratifyingly effusive. He looked forward to seeing her.

Shortly after Sunday lunchtime Blaylock presented himself at Jennie’s Islington door and was taken aback to have it opened to him by a strange girl with a long lick of vermilion hair half-obscuring her smoky eye. She wore a washed-out hoodie, torn jeans and boots, a ring high in her left ear and a stud in her right nostril. She seemed very much at home even as Blaylock gaped at her.

Jennie climbed the stairs from the basement, drying her hands on a tea towel. ‘Hi David, this is Alex’s friend Esther?’

Alex was behind Jennie, and he put a possessive hand on Esther’s arm, whereupon they mounted the stairs together. As a pair they certainly had the proper conspiratorial air as Blaylock remembered it.

He followed Jennie into the sitting room.

‘Are they an item?’

‘I’d be glad of it. Think it’s just friends for now. He met her at a gig? Nice girl, she’s doing a photography diploma at the City College – she’s twenty. So, she’d be a cradle-snatcher, to be fair.’

‘My god. I hope he knows what he’s doing.’

‘Eh, he’s got a lot going for him, whether you see it or not. Listen, do you mind if he stops in today? He’s a bit besotted, to be honest.’

‘Of course not.’ Blaylock smiled, wanting to say that he was all for infatuation. Today, though, Jennie was all business. Then their daughters appeared, Molly in her favourite jacket and flowery leggings, Cora in a version of Esther’s slacker duds, though on her they seemed purposely shapeless.

‘Cora, love,’ sighed her mother, ‘would you not think to wear the new top I got you?’

Cora only yanked her hoodie top over her head such that her hair protruded scarecrow-fashion. ‘What’s your problem?’

‘It’s whatever makes her happy,’ reasoned Blaylock.

‘No, David, it’s whatever makes me happy.’ But the look she
threw him was pert, more in the way of the old routines that made Blaylock obscurely content.

It was a fair, blowy autumn afternoon and so they walked to the nearby park: Andy Grieve at the rear of the foot patrol, Molly trundling along on her bicycle, Blaylock swinging her fluorescent pink helmet by a strap, half-listening to the girl’s report of her waning enthusiasm for violin lessons, mindful of how clammed up Cora seemed, her fists thrust into her hoodie pockets as she traipsed away in front.

At the park’s pavilion café Cora frowned over the menu while Blaylock queried her fruitlessly about schoolwork and friends and then gave up. In the end she dipped carrot sticks into a tiny tub of hummus, listlessly so, even after Molly, having demolished a mound of chicken and chips, had secured Blaylock’s permission to go off and ride her bike round the paved perimeter.

‘Cora love, would you maybe take the hoodie off?’

‘No, I’ll be cold.’

‘You’re going to sit there like that?’

‘What are you going to do, Dad?’

He didn’t ‘erupt’, merely nodded, and stared out across the park at the perambulators and dog-walkers and Sunday footballers. There was something in Cora’s determined solitariness that just reminded him of him. For that and for her flat rejoinders, he had to count himself responsible. Molly had been just a baby, had been spared. But when Cora and Alex were small children he had shouted at them terribly, inexcusably, and over time, even if only in their own reduced ways, they had begun to throw back at him the anger they had witnessed. ‘If all you ever do is try and settle it by force,’ Jennie had told him quietly, ‘you never learn a better way.’

Unhappy at feeling the past so close at hand again, Blaylock allowed his thoughts to stray instead toward the thousand drear dilemmas of work. Though he managed to keep his phone inside
his jacket, his thoughts were soon elsewhere. The letter from Eve had stayed with him, as had Madolyn Redpath’s contempt. He wondered what on earth he could do to redeem himself, since every option was painful.

It was the guttural bark of the dog that made him look up sharply, in time to see the scene unfold on the concrete forecourt in front of the café – he saw the German Shepherd, free of its leash, bound toward Molly on her bike, he saw her swerve dramatically and come crashing off head-first and un-helmeted onto the concrete.

He was out of his chair in an instant and yet Andy Grieve had moved before him, and got there first. He waved away the dog-owner’s flapping apologies and crouched by Andy, who was carefully elevating Molly’s upper body. To Blaylock’s alarm there were no tears, no blood, just a groggy, disoriented, awfully pale face.

‘She wasn’t out, was she, Andy?’

‘No, boss.’

Blaylock took over the holding of her and stared into her helpless pupils. ‘Get Martin, she needs the hospital.’

In the A&E waiting room he cradled Molly and buried his nose in her hair as fitful sobs finally came forth. He cursed himself for having let it happen – for all that he had suffered worse mortifications in front of a triage nurse. Gradually Molly consented to take small sips of water, spoke mournfully of a headache, but seemed to have come round.

Cora had been whisked home by the police vehicle before he had even reached Jennie on the phone, whereupon he had found her unusually calm. He was mildly surprised she had not chosen to join them, but then his reassurances, however guiltily, that all would be well had tended to ward off a mercy mission. He had wanted to do penance, and he was feeling fractionally better for it.

The A&E was fairly crowded with people, wearily accepting of the wait to varying degrees. The television was tuned to a drear afternoon soap for the grown-ups. The donated toys and games and injected plastic play-sets were heavily weathered and amputated of working parts, batteries long dead. Blaylock’s phone had no games. But Molly disinterred a chapter-book and he read to her and she to him, and so they rubbed along until disturbed by the swish of the automatic doors, and a miserable mucus-ridden sob.

Blaylock looked up to see a woman in obvious distress, shuffling into the waiting space with the awkward assistance of a female companion who had a close hold of her shaking shoulders. The woman was large, ageless and sexless in sweatshirt and sweatpants, unidentifiable under a curtain of long dry dark hair. Once she had been helped to sit, the distress became clearer for she raised her head and took her hand away from where she had been pressing a handkerchief. There was blood on her fingers, blood on her forehead, blood on the handkerchief. One eye socket was bruised – even, Blaylock feared, depressed. He could not guess how many blows she had sustained about the head and face. But he folded Molly into his arms against the sight. He had no wish to stare himself, but he sensed the whole room was sharing the discomfort.

The woman’s companion – of similar age but lean and better attired – had crouched by her yet wore a look of curious sternness.

‘I can’t stay, Gracie. But you’ll be okay?’

After the briefest glance Gracie returned the hankie to her eye socket.

‘This time, but, you have to do it. Right? It can’t happen again. If it does I can’t be helping you … You understand? If you don’t do something it’ll never change, you’ll get no peace and nor will the rest of us neither …’