The Knives (32 page)

‘You had respect for
mujahedin
?’

Blaylock studied his shoe and pondered Mo’s question. He was holding a circle and being listened to respectfully, like the wise elder. It seemed a useful position – flattering, to a degree, and possibly one Sadaqat had bargained for. Still, he was obliged to be honest.

‘Some of those fighters were – problematic,’ he said finally. ‘I had a bad time at a checkpoint once … Some bad things happened, not always black and white … But, I saw stuff that troubled me.’

‘Stuff like what?’

‘There was a thing … Some aid workers from Norway setting up a refugee camp east of us, they sent a message that they were worried about a
mujahedin
training camp there. Asked for our assistance. I took some of my platoon out to this field and we arrived in the middle of … quite a scene. Fifty-odd fighters
all clamouring round in a semi-circle, and we shoved our way through into the midst of it and found this guy there, on his knees with his wrists bound and his head down, next to a fresh-dug hole in the ground. They had knives, the
mujahedin
– they always had knives. And there was a guy with a Koran and I had the weirdest sense he’d been praying for the condemned. The prisoner, we got him off his knees – he was Croat but he wasn’t a soldier, he was a schoolteacher. So we saved his life, I suppose. We could do that much – summary execution, that wasn’t on. But it was something the
mujahedin
brought to the party. And it disturbed me. They’d been invited, sure, they were drawn to the fight, they made a difference. But they couldn’t be commanded, as far as I could see. You couldn’t put the genie back in the lamp.’

Blaylock had been staring aside. He heard a low, grave yet indistinct mutter and looked up to see Javed, unhappy.

‘Sorry, say again, Javed?’

‘I said what’s with the Ali Baba bullshit?’ He shook his head. ‘Genies and lamps. These were flesh-and-blood men. Come to help their suffering brothers, right?’

‘I don’t mean anything by it. My point is – the violence I saw in them, it was – notable. And I don’t think that helped Bosnian Muslims.’

‘Why
you
feel so strongly about Bosnian Muslims?’

Javed was sounding yet surlier. Blaylock, perplexed, gestured with open hands. ‘Because of … the injustice. What they were subjected to.’

‘Injustice is everywhere, man. It wasn’t because they was
white
Muslims? That didn’t mean more to you? Their lives and not—?’

‘Javed, leave it.’ Sadaqat’s voice cut through. ‘You’re out of order, man.’

After some moments, Javed’s eyes flicked back up to meet Blaylock’s. ‘I apologise. I shouldn’t put words in your mouth, thoughts in your head and that. What do I know? I’m sorry.’

‘We should speak freely,’ Blaylock replied. ‘That way we know what we’re thinking.’ He smiled as broadly as he could, drained his tea and got up, less steadily than he had hoped.

On the darkened journey back to Maryburn Blaylock was dejected, counting up what the day had cost him in physical capital – he felt it in his bones. Once back at home, melancholy settled on him like some fine, constricting web. Yet again he was alone with his work, the numbing constant in his life – indeed life seemed little but. In front of him lay a huge week: his identity cards plan in the balance, the Free Briton Brigade to be confronted. He could not say what it would amount to, but for sure the work dwarfed the cramped canvas of his ‘private life’, where privacy had resumed a look of barrenness and disuse.

He had done a decent job of expelling Abigail Hassall from his headspace but now, in the physical space that had briefly been their weekend retreat, he could not shut out the haunt of sexual loneliness. As he sat, absently, he set about worsening things for himself, imagining what Jennie and his children were doing with their Saturday evening, since there was no surer self-flagellation.

Fatigue darkened his eyes in the bathroom mirror, his spine felt as heavily knotted as vines round a listing tree. Undressing for bed he was dog-tired, bruised blue in patches down both arms, unable to raise either above his head. He wondered now if he would really keep his appointment with Dr Scott-Stokes in just over a week’s time. Some part of him resisted it still, refused to see the need of it. What did he really need? It seemed obvious – a respite, a holiday, to which he was not entitled. As he tugged off his socks wincingly and saw dried blood between his toes, he was reminded that Christmas, at least – his least favourite time of year – was in reach. He began to murmur an old Sinatra tune, his voice so risibly croaky that he cackled.

He was awakened in evening darkness by the phone, and realised he had slept atop the covers. It was Mark Tallis calling, and given the hour Blaylock knew instantly it could only be trouble.

‘Patrón,
I’m sorry, you’re going to need to get your eye onto this because the papers are all over it and it’s heavy.’

‘Go on.’

‘A woman called Sally Duffett was found murdered yesterday in Harlow. Essex Police have a witness, they’ve let it out that their only suspect is her ex-partner, he’s an ex-con, ex-illegal immigrant and they’re saying he flew into the UK first thing yesterday, went to this woman’s place, killed her, then flew straight back to Latvia out of Stansted.’

‘Hold on, what – what about his immigration status?’

‘I know, how did he get in and out of the UK? When he’s done prison time here and, the word is, he had form in fucking Latvia, too.’

‘Was he on a fake passport?’

‘We wish. The papers already got the nod it was his own legit passport, he just got waved through. The theory they’ve got their teeth into is that some new joiner at border control, one of our temps who’d just had a day’s training, didn’t know any better and waved him through.’

‘Aw fuck it,
fuck
it.’ Blaylock stood, feeling a powerful urge to dash his handset to bits against the wall.

‘This is what I had read down the line at me, allegedly a regular border guy at Heathrow, “A proper Borders officer would have had this guy’s number, that’s what happens when the Home Secretary lays off a thousand passport control workers.” Et cetera …’

Blaylock rubbed his face, feeling cold beneath his feet and, creeping up his back, the flush of calamity.

‘Okay. Okay. I’ll have to put my paws up. Statement to the House on Monday.’

‘Number Ten are asking what’s the line? We’ve got to be clear.’

Blaylock stared ahead at the wall, conscious of his brain still trying to engage with his mouth through the fug. But it wasn’t clear. Nothing was clear other than that he would sleep no more for the night.

The first train to King’s Cross gave Blaylock ample time in which to review the story’s utter misery. In black and white it was perfectly grim and run by all outlets: ‘UK LET IN FOREIGN FLY-BY KILLER’.

As ever, the photographs said too much and not enough. The victim, Sally Duffett – a florist’s assistant, lively, outgoing, said to do a good turn for anyone – surely could not have been involved with such a violent man. But the suspect, Viktor Karlov, was a figure of mystery: Latvian passport, resident in Poland when he received a British work permit, believed to be Russian on the building sites where he had laboured. Burly in cement-caked jeans and tee-shirt he grinned from his photo like one far too friendly to ever be found in a police line-up. Yet in Latvia, unknown to UK authorities, he had been imprisoned for causing a man’s death in a bar fight. And at Snaresbrook Crown Court he had been sentenced to three years for assaulting Sally Duffett, a year of which he served before release on the condition that he left the UK never to return. Such was his hatred of Sally that he had risked just such a return to attack her and beat her until she died.

That Karlov had not been stopped pointed to a tiny yet acute flaw in oversight, and there were innumerable reasons why that chink had opened – but Blaylock knew that none of this mattered, for he was alive and Sally Duffett was dead, and the gloom in which he had gone to bed the previous night now seemed to him a culpable puddle of self-pity.

Sally Duffett’s parents had given a lancing statement to the papers through a lawyer. ‘
It is very hard to accept that a dangerous
criminal could come and go unbeknown to authorities
.
The system has failed us.’
There was no answer to it, though Blaylock knew he had to send his condolences, in what form he could not say. For the part of the account that was causing a true ache between his eyes was the family’s allegation that a threatening letter from Karlov to Sally had been passed by her to police, who forwarded it to the Home Office, Shovell Street.

The existence of such a letter – and whether it was received and logged and replied to – and if so, whether it was replied to adequately – were questions nearly sufficient to make Blaylock hope Monday would not come. His Sunday was already determined for him. He was resisting all media requests but he needed working hours to prepare his defence in light of the week ahead. Nearing London he called Jennie with an apology to say he would be unable to take the children for the afternoon.

‘No, I understand, you’ll have a day on your hands,’
she replied, sounding uncommonly low. He asked if she was okay. She admitted that her mother was in worsening health, due to undergo a bone marrow biopsy. He felt the cold hand of his news: Bea, he knew, had made plain that if cancer returned she would have no stomach for a second ordeal. Offering his felt sympathy, he knew Jennie would be wracked, that the children would be loving and supportive, and that he needed to press on alone with his own share of woes.

Sunday afternoon, as he worked behind drawn blinds with media loitering across the road, was wretched. Taking a break to check through a pile of recent correspondence, he was further dispirited to find a letter from Diane Cleeve, rebuking him as the source of her recent troubles in the press – as well she might, in Blaylock’s opinion.

On Sunday night Mark Tallis called and things worsened immeasurably.

‘This is bad
, patrón.
Someone’s leaked Quarmby’s immigration report to the
Correspondent.’

‘His draft? Or the one with our redactions?’

‘His. They seem to know all the internal arguments. I said we don’t comment on leaks, but, this, Jesus … This is the lead: “The Home Office has been sitting on and censoring an independent report that shows a damning record of failure and neglect in immigration services.” Obviously they’re going to town on the delays and the dumping grounds and all the limbos and the legal failures but – this whole thing of foreign offenders we haven’t deported and people refused who we’ve lost track of, it just—’

‘Yeah,’ Blaylock filled in, quietly. ‘It would be bad any week. This week it’s murder.’ His mind still reeled uselessly at the implications.

‘Thing is
, patrón,
I have to say, it’s your girlfriend’s paper, it’s the fucking
Correspondent.’

‘She’s not my girlfriend. Abby and I are done.’

If thrown momentarily, Tallis pressed on regardless.
‘Well, she must have known, she must, it can’t be an accident, David.’

Blaylock knew Abby had known of the report – of its suppressed status, too. She could have had no sense of its contents unless she had snaffled it from his red box. Was it possible she had crept from their bed to carry out espionage while he slept? The image was too awful.

‘So, we’re in for a week of fucking misery, a week if it goes well, we need to get ramped up for it … David? David, are you there? Have I lost you?’

Blaylock had shut his eyes and the blackness in his head was suddenly so huge and suffocating he thought he would be overwhelmed by it – even wished it might be so.

‘Mark, this is not the greatest time for clarity in my mind …’

‘I know
, patrón,
but you’re got to hear the signal on this. Someone’s out to get you. I don’t mean a conspiracy. But you know the
media, there has to be one politician in the stocks at any given time, and all of a sudden you fit a lot of descriptions. So, someone’s had a push, and given you a knock, and now they’re all queuing up to give you a shove that’ll knock you right off.’

Blaylock listened, conscious at the end of a hard weekend notably short on collegiate phone calls that Tallis was probably the truest ally he had. He rang off with the assurance that he would act.

First, he called Roger Quarmby.

‘Roger, I have to ask if you knew your report was going to reach the public in the way it has?’

‘Obviously, I don’t know the full range of tactics you consider respectable for your ends, Home Secretary, but I would never resort to such a thing as you imply. So, no, I am not your leaker. May I now suggest you put your own house in order? I have been saying something similar for a while now, have I not? And for the future – if we can speak of futures – my further advice would be that when you ask for a report, then just publish the report you asked for.’

Having taken a scratch sufficient to get his back up, Blaylock then dialled Abby’s number. She answered sounding breathless, like some parody of their former close relations.

‘David, I guess you heard.’

‘You couldn’t have given me some warning of this?’

‘Truly, I had no idea. It’s just happened very fast, it was all fixed up between one journalist, and the editor and the news editor, and … I heard about it probably when you did.’

‘That’s bullshit, Abby.’

‘David, come on. Don’t act now like you don’t know how it works. Look, I’m sorry, obviously, I realise it’s trouble for you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘But … I mean, you knew it would be trouble, yes? You must have seen this coming. It’s not like the story’s wrong—’

‘It’s a leak of a draft containing errors and information that oughtn’t to be in the public domain, so don’t rush to the high ground, okay? There’s sensitive information there, are you the judge of that?’

‘It’s not my story, David.’

‘Right, you just work there. Who leaked it to you?’

‘To the paper? Come on. I just told you, I’ve no idea.’

‘Not convincing, Abby.’

‘Sorry, are you actually asking was it me, David?’

‘Yes.’

The long exhale down the line was also oddly reminiscent to Blaylock of time shared.
‘Surely you see, there is someone in your operation who’s done this, and … I’m trying to understand why you’ve got on the line to grind your teeth at me about it. The problem is in your own ranks, David. Forgive me but I’d have thought that’s where you need to go shout at people.’

‘Thanks for your advice.’

The silence was searing to him, and again familiar, and he realised he should have known it would come.

‘Do you have any interest in helping me out on this? For old time’s sake?’

‘I’d be in an impossible position.’

‘Fair enough. The position’s always been impossible, hasn’t it, Abby?’

It was a dead rejoinder. He hung up, shaking his head slowly at the pure dismay of it – the connection he had briefly imagined between them, one that had wound up as entirely of the lower sort.

‘You’re unusual.’
Hadn’t she said that? He had certainly believed it, and that credulity seemed now the most damning thing he had to accept as his crime. In fact – certainly in this case – he was nothing of the sort. It was indeed stunning to him just how much he had turned out to be like all the rest; and how much so – a blow of its own to the spirit – had she.