The Knives (31 page)

Though Blaylock’s weekend had a challenging look about it, Friday at least offered a sooner than usual escape from the office to the Darlington train. From the comfort of his berth in First Class he studied the morning’s papers, their widespread and gratifying coverage of the capture of Kristian Vollan in Dudley.

Leaving Andy to mind their goods he pin-balled his way through the carriage toward the toilets. Beside the door to the vestibule was a man alone at a table of four, reading his evening paper held upright and stretched stiff over what looked to be the remnants of a full English breakfast. But as Blaylock neared, the newspaper came down to reveal the face of Duncan Scarth, a study in self-satisfaction.

‘Afternoon, David?’

Blaylock’s instinct was to walk on, yet he felt the provocation.

‘Mr Scarth. Where are you headed?’

‘Home for the weekend. Like yourself, eh? A bit business, a bit pleasure.’ He folded his paper and tossed it to the table. ‘Yeah, as you’ll be aware, we expect to be in your neck of the woods in a week’s time. The response on Teesside has been very encouraging.’

‘I doubt that very much.’

‘Well, I trust you’ll respect the rights of ordinary working-class people to meet and express their opinions. You’ll not be running off scared as seems to be your wont.’

Andy had come down the aisle, to Blaylock’s dismay.

‘Yeah, I’ve no fears where that’s concerned. As to your little pub crawl, Cleveland Police will decide if it’s viable.’

‘What, you’ll not have a say? Tsk. Typical politician. Always
ducking the issue.’

It was foolish, he knew, to squabble with such a man in such a public space. If he did so with Scarth, why not a thousand more? Glowering, he pushed on through the door, leaving Andy to give Scarth a little more of the evil eye.

From Darlington Blaylock was driven directly to the campus-like headquarters of Cleveland Police, there to discuss the FBB’s Thornfield march with the Chief Constable – a lean and unprepossessing man, anxiously furrowed of brow yet given, in Blaylock’s experience, to a notable bluffness that might have been calculated to remind folk he was from Leeds, and not just some sort of pencil-pusher.

‘I take it the key factor at your side is the citizenship ceremony scheduled that day at the Town Hall, yes?’

‘Right. Obviously that goes ahead, we’re not stopping that. I’m sure it’s not escaped the FBB’s notice. The guy in charge of them—’

‘Gary Wardell?’

‘No, their bankroller, Duncan Scarth? He has implied to me heavily that he wants to cause me bother in my own constituency.’

‘You’ve had – dialogue with him?’

‘He keeps following me around. Like the proverbial smell.’

‘Well. Look. We can police this demo, no bother. For starters there’s no football on. We’ve a provisional route mapped out that’s a good mile away from the Town Hall, they’ll not get near any hot-spots. Plenty of barriers, good visible presence of officers, we’ll get the community support out and about, and a few wagons of riot boys on standby.’

‘You seem very confident.’

‘Confident, yes. Not complacent. So am I reassuring you here? Or have you still got concerns?’

‘The Met have given me some grounds to think there’s more
badness in this lot than meets the eye. You’ll be aware the bomber in Dudley had … affinities with them. Of some sort.’

‘Yes. Awful business, that. But a load of clicks on the internet doesn’t add up to a movement, does it? I’d say we have a pretty good intelligence picture ourselves. People like your man in Dudley, they’re lone wolves. They don’t mix in too well with football hooligans. And hooligans, really, are what we’re looking at here. Wouldn’t you say?’

Within the hour Blaylock was sitting in his constituency office over mugs of tea with Councillor Chopra, having attained the settled mind he had sought; but having settled, too – given Mr Chopra’s evident disgruntlement – into the role of bad guy that seemed to be his lot. Blaylock wondered anew if he didn’t somehow wish it for himself, or consider that no scenario was otherwise complete.

‘The view of councillors is unanimous. The community, unanimous! Business, unanimous! There will be trouble in the streets, shops will stay shut for fear. We don’t
want
them here.’

‘The march can’t be banned unless the police recommend it, and they do not. The Chief Constable is sure they have the resources to deal with the thing properly.’

‘Why should taxpayers foot that bill? For such people?’

‘It’s not my view that affordability should be paramount where you’re talking about the right to demonstrate.’

‘Excuse me, Mr Blaylock, your type of politics is all about telling us what our taxes can and can’t afford.’

Blaylock acknowledged the insult by meeting Chopra’s incensed eye. ‘This is a one-off cost that is manageable. But I’d ask you to set aside the idea it’s about politics. There’s no ignoring the free speech issue. So I’d suggest you try to imagine the logic of the ban you’re proposing being applied to speech that you’re in favour of.’

‘These people, they talk free speech but on social media it is “Muslims are terrorists”, “Muslims are paedophiles”. All they
want is a cover for their racism. So they can strut around parading their Islamophobia.’

‘I totally understand your wish to have them silenced. But as distasteful as some of their views are—’

‘
Some
of their views—?’

‘Yes, “some”. There is a line, in all public speech, between the sort of thing any decent person should deplore, and the sort of thing one may just disagree with or not want to hear.’

‘You are
defending
them?’

‘Not a bit. But nor do I see why you need to feel so protective of your religion.’

‘Mr Blaylock – our community is fearful, right now, with great reason. It is besieged, and you seem oblivious.’

In that Blaylock planned to spend his Saturday afternoon tramping through a dank cave with a group of young Muslim men, he felt his ties to the community were as tight as they had ever been. And yet the thought of those exertions ahead was already giving him phantomic twinges in his back and knees, and having sworn himself off the whisky for the night he wanted his bed.

‘I don’t downplay that. I ask us all to stand together. Not to be cowed. There is a provocation I’m well aware of. It’s our citizenship ceremony being targeted, on a day to celebrate diversity. I believe the correct approach is to show these people they have the right to speak, let them speak, and let them shame themselves.’

‘To me, a politician must say when things are not tolerable.’

‘Words bother me less than deeds, Councillor. Now I’ve got a very early start tomorrow, will you forgive me?’

Blaylock was on the roads by 11 a.m. and did the hour’s journey to the North York Moors in gauzy November sunlight that broke through the clouds and gave the bracken slopes a burnished glow as the Jaguar ripped along country lanes. From his backseat Blaylock silently admired the broad grassy moorland, the dry-stone walls and grazing sheep and secluded whitewashed pubs, behind whose wooden doors he felt a wistful urge to vanish for the afternoon.

Martin had for some time been scowling at the sat-nav when their joining party came abruptly into view on the horizon, congregated by a parked minibus on a gravelly hard shoulder ahead – four young men ready for action in neoprene and over-suits, helmets on, harnesses with belay plates and Prusik loops dangling.

Climbing from the Jaguar Blaylock was uncommonly aware of his police team parking up behind, though he could read little reaction to them from the expressions of Sadaqat’s group. Sensing he needed to pitch in big he exchanged hardy greetings and handshakes with them, though there were not the jokey spirits he had expected, more of a subdued pre-match feel in the air, not so far from Blaylock’s own mood. Sadaqat’s quiet authority was clear, his gaze intent under the dark line of his brow. Javed continued to exude the vague discontent of the perennial wingman. Muhammad, ‘Mo’, he of the tonsured lightning flash, seemed tightly wound, nodding his head to some internal beat. Bespectacled Nasser was the only one who smiled, albeit in a sickly manner that spoke of nerves.

Sadaqat beckoned Blaylock to the minibus bonnet, spread out a map and pinned it against the breeze with his elbows. Blaylock was aware of Andy sidling across to peer over his shoulder.

‘Looks like we’ve plenty to see down there?’

‘All the trouble you’ve gone to, I didn’t think you’d want to just climb inside a hatch and poke round some grotty passageways. It’s a long-ish cave but no big surprises. We abseil in, okay by you?’

Blaylock nodded, imagining Andy’s expression at his back.

‘We go along some vadose canyons. The water disperses a few different ways but we’ll keep clear, mainly we’re just hacking along phreatic passages that used to be streamways, and finally we get back to the light through a sump. Not too hairy but we’re gonna get wet, yeah?’

‘Got it,’ replied Blaylock, more or less nonplussed.

There was gear awaiting him in the back of the minibus and he climbed in, stripped off and suited up with some awkwardness, relieved that no smartphone-wielding Instagrammer was around to snap him in his jockey shorts. Moments later it struck him with a vexing pang that this whole outing was a notable photo opportunity to which no one, it seemed, had thought to invite an official photographer.

A shuddering bang on the door of the van made him start. It was Sadaqat. ‘We ready?’

They clambered over a stone wall and picked their way along a beaten track in silence, Sadaqat very much the point-man, Blaylock glad to feel the exertion and the good air and the grass under his boots, his mood only partially clouded by imaginings of the challenge ahead. Not far into a nondescript field Sadaqat stopped by a small manhole cover, and he and Javed stooped and heaved it aside. As Blaylock stood somewhat apart watching Javed unravel an abseil rope and Sadaqat fasten himself up in readiness, Andy moved to his shoulder.

‘Boss, you sure you don’t want me to say you’ve been urgently summoned to Downing Street?’

Blaylock feigned a chuckle and moved toward the manhole where Sadaqat was evincing a notable zeal to push off.

‘Don’t you want your helmet light on?’

‘Nah, my friend. I like to just – plunge into the void, yeah?’

Then, with a good seize of the rope, he was backing away down into the blackness. Blaylock waited, clocking the blank expressions on the faces of his comrades for the day as Sadaqat vanished.

‘Rope free!’ The cry echoed up from the depths.

‘You, sir?’ Nasser indicated to Blaylock, somewhat bashful.

Blaylock clicked on his own helmet light, clipped and fastened himself and, with a little local difficulty, heaved himself to the brink of the drop. He gripped the rope and, gingerly, put his weight to it, intensely conscious of the eyes upon him. Then he leaned back with his legs apart and sought the happiest distribution of his bulk, taking the judder and scrape of the shaft’s surface under his boots.
Howay!
, he goaded himself, and began to let the rope release through his hands.

He took the descent gently, peering about the gloom as the faces and the rope above him receded from view. Soon he could make out the shape of Sadaqat below, then he felt his soles settle on a balcony of rock, and he set to unclamping himself.

‘Okay?’ Sadaqat’s voice seemed eerily disembodied.

‘No bother,’ Blaylock replied, breathless. ‘Rope free!’

Now Blaylock knocked off his own lamplight and watched the others come down one by one, their torch beams swivelling wildly round the shaft. Mo, rather as Blaylock had expected, flew downward with one or two cavalier thrusts of his boot-sole away from the rock. And then they were five, the darkness making it a little difficult to truly discern one from another.

‘Okay,’ Sadaqat spoke from the stillness. ‘No rules down here but do as I say.’

‘And, look after each other, right?’ offered Blaylock. In the silence that met him he was conscious of sound reverberating off rock, a distant dulled rush of water, his own heartbeat – all the strange music of the underworld.

Sadaqat led and they followed, sploshing into a watery passage of stooping height. As the torch beams darted about, insect-like, Blaylock saw the walls were red clay. Peering closer he made out crude markings scratched by cavers past – ‘Pickering FC’, ‘Kill Nothing But Time!’, ‘Lost! Dave’s Bollocks! Please Return!’ – as rough as the odour of damp and fetid cave air.

‘Why do I think some animal died here fairly recently?’ he uttered into the dark.

‘What you’re smelling’, Sadaqat shot over his shoulder, ‘is Nasser.’

For all that Blaylock felt heavy-footed he could tell that Nasser, to his rear, was more so, judging by the rhythm of his steps and frequent muttered exclamations.

They passed into a clean-washed canyon where Blaylock’s hopes for a head-height ceiling were dashed. Rather, it gradually decreased to a gap of merely a few feet from the ground. ‘Time to grovel, boys,’ grunted Sadaqat. Crawling on hands and knees, his nose grazing mud and gravel, elbows periodically immersed in water, Blaylock had to ask himself why he wasn’t slumped in an armchair at home, with tea and toast and the football on the radio.

The next cave, however, enlarged gradually such that they could all walk erect. Up ahead Sadaqat’s long figure and ridged backpack loaned him the appearance of a winged messenger, and past his questing figure Blaylock could see two passages cleaved by a rocky obelisk, one carrying the water’s slow-flowing course. They took the other, so entering a tube-like tunnel, its walls evidently smoothed clean by centuries of erosion. Sadaqat paused at the head of a chamber and beckoned them with a hand.

Blaylock looked up and about, his helmet’s beam vying with the others, glancing in reflected colours off the crystalline calcite spar that appeared to have petrified the cave surfaces. And he felt wonder fall upon him – felt himself, momentarily, to have entered some great and ancient catacombs – for on all sides were shelf-like
rock formations, large petrifactions of humanoid proportions, suggestive of bodies laid upon bodies, conceivably not dead but merely dormant. Looking up Blaylock saw that the ceiling had assumed, to his eye, more fantastical, grotesque shapes – clusters of swollen bulbous stalactites that appeared, amid the subterranean dankness, like markers of a creature’s lair.

‘Amazing,’ he muttered. No response issued from the silence, until Sadaqat called out, ‘We’ve got a squeeze coming up.’

They came to a narrow, slimy gap between rocks, the exertion of passage through it causing Blaylock to feel for a fleeting instance that he was somehow birthing himself. The passage they entered was teardrop-shaped, a stream running down its middle in a trough, its walls, floor and ceiling all decorated by water action. There, looking up and about, he was newly stunned – for the walls had been scalloped, their surfaces ridged and fibrous, folds upon folds glistening and pearly-pink in the flicker of the helmet lamps.

Bracing himself with his fingers splayed against mucid rock, Blaylock had the strongest urge to throw back his head and laugh from his gut at the sheer flesh-like, feminised beauty of what he was seeing – so removed from the necrotic chamber through which they had just come. He would have liked even more to share the laugh with his companions, and the towering inappropriateness of that notion on near enough every level struck him as a laugh all of its own.

Then he heard Sadaqat from behind him. ‘Headlamps off.’

The others obeyed. Blaylock, perplexed, nonetheless did likewise. The darkness was complete. The silence settled.

Inside his neoprene shell Blaylock began to feel simultaneously clammy and chilly. Then he could hear feet shuffling around him, and had the strangest sense that he was being encircled. Unease reared up in him with a prickling rapidity.

‘Listen …’ he heard Sadaqat say.

Then Nasser laughed – his sickly, uneasy laugh. ‘Nah, this is
just weird, man. I mean, crazy.’ The laugh strangulated into a cough. ‘Fuck sake, can’t be doing this.’

‘Nasser, be quiet.’ It was Sadaqat, sharp. ‘Man up, yeah? No one lose their head. I am in charge, you listen.’

Blaylock, wanting to speak, found his lips had gone dry.

Nasser, though, could not stop. ‘Naw, can’t
take
it, you fucking
hear
me? I cannot take it,
I’m not fucking kidding around
!’

Blaylock reached and turned on his helmet lamp, suddenly seeing Nasser’s panicked features under white light. The other dimmer faces appeared motionless. He stepped forward and took Nasser by the shoulders.

‘You’re fine, Nasser, okay? There’s nothing to fear. Tell me you’re fine.’

‘I’m not—’ he stammered, still dazed.

‘It’s just your mind. Alright? Trust the ground under your feet. We’re all here with you, there’s nothing to fear. Just breathe, let it go through you, the panic – it’s nothing.’

Nasser’s eyes met his at last, somehow guiltily, but attentive. Blaylock swung round, his light swiping round the group.

‘Let’s move, right? Right? Sadaqat? Get the lights on.’

The moment seemed to stretch until he heard a low exhalation and, once more, multiple light beams riddled the black murk.

A quarter of an hour later, after one final slosh through a freezing cold sump, they scrabbled up over rocks and back into the daylight, where Blaylock was struck to see Andy Grieve looking so plainly relieved. The group retraced their path back to the vehicles, Blaylock deciding to walk with Nasser, who still wore the demeanour of a mistreated hound. Remembering Sadaqat’s introduction he asked after the young man’s ambitions in medicine. Nasser spoke fretfully of his need to attain a biology A-level, since chemistry was all he really knew.

By the van, while the others peeled off their neoprene skins,
Blaylock approached Sadaqat. ‘Listen, the lights-out routine back there, what was that about?’

Sadaqat stood up tall yet looked abashed. ‘I want to apologise. It was … the wrong move. See, my thing is, in the cave I like to find a way to take a moment? Just to be quiet, in the dark, and just listen to the cave, and the ambience, and your heart in your chest … that silence, yeah?’ He shrugged. ‘Nasser, I think maybe he just thought he could hear things crawling about.’

Part of Blaylock wanted to be on his way, but another part, dissatisfied, wished to round off the day’s activity with some gesture of companionability. And so in fading light the Jaguar tailed the minibus to the site of an outdoor centre, a converted barn with outdoor burners where the group were booked among others to camp overnight.

Blaylock accepted a glass mug of hot sweet tea, a samosa of spiced vegetables and an invitation to sit with the group round a burner. Lowering himself with a wince, he was glad of the heat on his face and the relief for his swollen knees and aching back, more conscious than ever of the senior figure he cut in this company.

‘I don’t think I’ve had such a workout since the army.’

‘How come you joined the army? Back in the day?’ It was Mo who spoke. Blaylock realised he had rather hoped for such a show of interest.

‘I had some idea about serving my country. Not that I achieved it as a soldier … But, you know, that idea has carried on to other areas.’

‘You weren’t, like, into the idea of being a soldier? ’Cos of the excitement and that?’

‘Oh … there was maybe a bit of thrill-seeking to it. It was a different time – I never saw real war, thank god. Not like Afghanistan or Iraq. Not so many war stories … But, we all lived. So I should be thankful.’

‘You were in Bosnia,’ Sadaqat stated, with an assertive calm.

‘That’s right. Part of the UN peacekeepers. No, what I was going to say – the reason you join up, the appeal of it, the principle of it – is that your character gets forged. And you do get tested, there’s no escape. But the worth of it? Arguably you have to decide for yourself. If you’re going to die – or worse – then what is it for? It’s certainly easier if you’re sure you’re on the right side. And where I was, we were facing some pretty bad sorts.’

‘Bosnia, that was a bad scene for them Bosnian Muslims, yeah?’ Mo picked up the baton. ‘They was getting it real bad?’

‘Yep,’ Blaylock sighed, setting his tea down on the grass. ‘The regular Bosnian army, it wasn’t much cop. They really needed help. But we had limits on what we could do. What changed the game, really, was
mujahedin
coming in, proper fighters, proper gear, fiercer, more committed. I mean … you saw them and you weren’t in any doubt they were ready to fight and kill and maybe die. It had an effect, you could tell. Even the regular Bosnian guys at checkpoints, they stopped hitting on their hipflasks and started saying their prayers.’