The Knives (34 page)

The innuendo was typical, Blaylock thought. He checked his watch, 10.35 p.m., and regular as the school bell Mark Tallis called
with what he had gleaned of tomorrow’s papers, starting with the
Correspondent’s
line of attack.

‘“
A blind eye has been turned to illegal immigrants cleared to work in sensitive Whitehall security jobs, including at David Blaylock’s under-fire Home Office. One such employee, subsequently dismissed, is 25-year-old Nigerian national Fusi Solaragu, who was on such friendly terms with Blaylock that the blundering Home Secretary gifted him a gratis hospitality package to a top Premier League football match.
”’

‘My god. I’d wondered what had happened to that guy.’

‘
So, you didn’t declare those tickets
, patrón?’

‘No, Mark, I forgot all the fuck about them.’

‘
To be fair
,’ Tallis coughed, ‘
people might say it was decent of you
.’

‘Come on, Mark, I just told the House every employer in the land has a duty not to hire illegals. This is just cutting me off at the knees.’

‘
Yeah, I’ve talked to the guy who wrote the story, I told him, “You and me are going to seriously fall out.” He said, “That’s politics, Mark,” like he was my fucking dad or something. Then he tells me, “My boss said your boss has a target on his back and we’d not be doing our job if we didn’t keep firing.
”’

Blaylock’s eye was drawn back to the muted TV screen where the presenter was showing off tomorrow’s headlines. ‘BLAYLOCK’S BLUNDERS.’ ‘KNIVES OUT FOR BLAYLOCK.’ It was as if they wished to bury him under a welter of alliterative crisis-cliché. He could see that a study of disarray was being painted in thick strokes, with him in the centre as an ad hoc, skin-saving, trouble-dodging chancer. Worse, the longer he looked at the story, the more he seemed to recognise himself.

On the second morning of the debacle Blaylock disturbed Phyllida Cox bright and early, seeking to arm himself with some clarity in advance of a live interrogation he had agreed to undergo on
Today.

‘Yes, David, some weeks ago we were alerted to some problems with our subcontractor of security services, I ordered a recheck of all credentials, Mr Solaragu had a professional licence, what he didn’t have was leave to remain – his documents were false. Obviously he had to be dismissed and deported.’

‘Nobody thought to tell me this?’

‘There was a desire not to bother you, a concern for what would be your reaction—’

‘You’re saying it was my fault?’

‘Of course not, what I mean—’

‘Forget it, I see where we’re going.’

Mere minutes after his ramparts had been reduced to smoking ruins by Laura Hampshire he stepped out of his front door to be met by a jostle of shouting press. ‘Are you going to resign, Home Secretary …!?’

Arriving at the Cabinet Room antechamber close to the wire for the start of proceedings he observed his fellow holders of the great offices of state, Tennant and Moorhouse, in a tight conference with the Captain and Sir Alan Ruthven. He had a sudden, paining premonition of his removal from the top table – and sidling up to this group revived in him some adolescent sense of trying to fit in with a set of indifferent peers. Belatedly he realised they had
been discussing the planned gathering of ministers on Sunday at Vaughan’s rural fastness in Dorset. Only when Vaughan made eye contact did Blaylock have any sense that his presence was still expected or required.

In Cabinet he directed a grimace at the table for the four-item forty-five-minute agenda, aware that at the bottom of a slough it was a forlorn hope to find company. What was clear was that for the moment he was leprous, radioactive; and he could imagine that some round the table would happily put a hundred quid on his being gone by the weekend, and uncap a good bottle of something in the event.

The evening paper piled onto his predicament with reports that his ‘closest allies’ were apparently as frantic and accident-prone as Blaylock himself had been painted. ‘YOU DON’T WANT TO MAKE HIM ANGRY!’ was the headline splash. Their reporter had recorded a call in which Mark Tallis had warned the hack away from further incurring Blaylock’s wrath. The paper had also obtained verbatim accounts of texts sent to backbenchers by Trevor Parry, urging loyalty and claiming Blaylock was being witch-hunted. Blaylock winced at the terms used. ‘For god’s sake ask yourselves why DB being targeted!? You think certain jealous parties aren’t out to get him?’ The implication that these loyal foot-soldiers were ventriloquist dummies for their boss was clear.

Tallis was excruciatingly contrite. ‘I know,
patrón
, if I become the story it’s the worst outcome, I mean I feel I’m the cause of all this—’

‘Oh, lay off, Mark, it’s a venial sin in the scheme of things.’

A text pinged to Blaylock’s phone:
David can you talk? If so please call. J.
Fully expecting Jennie to add to his pains he went out and found a vacant soundproofed pod.

‘How’s Bea?’ he asked her, and knew at once that he had touched the exquisite point.

‘The cancer’s back. And it’s spreading, rapidly. The oncologist said even an aggressive treatment might only give her a few months …’

‘I’m so sorry, Jennie. What will she do?’

‘Well, you know her view. We’re just talking about … managing it.’

‘If I can help in any way.’

‘Thank you.’

They were silent for some moments.

‘David … why I really got in touch, a journalist tried to reach me at chambers today, by false pretences I might add. And when I called them back they just wanted to ask me about you, and our marriage. I’m sorry to say they must have got to a few other people who may have, I don’t know, hinted at stuff … about your temper and the police getting called that time. I told them it was all beneath contempt and I had no comment.’

‘That was … good of you, Jennie. I mean …’

‘
Oh, it makes me sick. This hack has the nerve to say to me, “If that sort of thing went on don’t you owe it to your kids to be honest about it?
”’

‘Well, I mean, it’s not for me to say he hasn’t maybe got a point.’

‘David, I honestly don’t think it’s any other bugger’s business. Not now.’

At 11.36 Tallis phoned him with the news that the
Correspondent’s
morning offensive would focus on passport chaos: ‘FRESH BLOW LEAVES HOME OFFICE POLICY IN TATTERS.’

‘Yeah, they managed to find the one fucking border agent on a passport kiosk who’s an illegal immigrant.’

‘That’s a pretty good one,’ Blaylock sighed. ‘I have to admit.’

‘Yeah, well, the rest of it is just the most abject sniffing about.
They put a hotline up for people’s stories and you’ve got people talking rot about all the times they arrived into airports to find deserted customs halls and empty desks.’

‘We know that happens, it’s not us, but, hey – what can we do?’

‘Not just take it, is what,
patrón.
The thing that’s out of order, they’ve hashed up a sort of a sidebar on you with stuff about your divorce, your kids—’

‘Yeah, I know. Whatever. There are no skeletons there. There were only two people in my marriage, and Jennie will not be talking.’

Tallis, seeming to feel the sudden bite in Blaylock’s tone, was pacified.

On the third day of the debacle he began to wonder if he was paranoid, or whether, in spite of his freefall, his department had actually acquired a collective spring in its step. He kept seeing slight smiles on people’s faces as if, in the teeth of catastrophe, their day had been made.

There was no tremendous hurry, the size of the current crisis seemed to defeat urgency. Rather, the die was cast, the Fates had chosen and the Minister was about to get hanged. Such urgency as there was, he felt, could easily be about how to cleanly show him to the door, what to get him as a light-hearted leaving gift. Who would buy the card, who would arrange the covert collection?

He was grateful when Geraldine put Lord Orchard through on the phone, with an offer of dinner at the nearby Spice of Life on Vauxhall Bridge Road. Blaylock fancied he might ask Jim for his advice on the possibilities of life after politics.

Duty told him he needed to keep focused on departmental work: after all, it still mattered. And yet it was absurd to him that he should act as though there was not a massive chance he would be out of the job by Friday. Preparing for Select Committee he
found himself silent when asked for his thoughts.
I could say any number of things, but so what?

Afterward he convened the spads. He felt physically diminished, and they looked etiolated themselves.

‘I hate to sound a wimp but I’m not sure how much of this attrition I can handle. Outside our little circle, who really thinks I should stay? Maybe we’re outside reality. In our bunker. “The last days.” Maybe I should keep the cyanide capsule close at hand.’

Deborah shot a withering look, more like her old self. ‘Forgive me,
mein Führer
, this ain’t Berlin, okay? And I’m not fucken Eva Braun.’

Tallis seemed to rise to the grim spirit. ‘Nor am I Goebbels, if that’s the typecasting. And I don’t see any Russian tanks rolling up the Mall.’

Blaylock felt a helpless hissing laugh escape him, the laughter that awfulness encouraged. ‘Who are you in this role-play then, Ben?’

Ben, though, was subdued. ‘I don’t much care for the tone of it.’

Poor Scarecrow, he’ll miss me most of all
, Blaylock thought.

He took his seat for Prime Minister’s Questions to the Captain’s right, between Caroline Tennant and Dominic Moorhouse, who shrunk from him such as to give him rather more room on the bench than he needed. Then came the onslaught.

‘Isn’t it clear that the Home Secretary cannot give his department the leadership it’s crying out for?’

‘I will take no lessons on leadership from the Right Honourable Gentleman. The Home Secretary has my complete confidence …’

Vaughan’s declaration roused the Opposition to jocose heights. Blaylock smiled, arranged his features condescendingly, trusting that the whole government bench were doing likewise in solidarity. In his heart, though, the Prime Minister’s words felt like the
serving of the proverbial cup of hemlock.
It can’t go on like this. It has to stop.

He headed for his Commons office with the first sentence of a resignation letter having formed an ineluctable shape in his head. The Chief Whip lay in wait by his door.

‘David, a word, the chair of the backbench committee has been to see me …’

Blaylock nodded. Trevor Parry was also drawing near, undeterred even by the Chief Whip. At close quarters Blaylock realised the alarm on Parry’s face. ‘David, it’s urgent, there’s a gunman on the loose up in your part of the world.’

Inside his office the challenge was to power up the small television and locate its remote control. The scene on the small too-bluish monitor was a live unfolding story, the TV news image presented split-screen, and still Blaylock knew at once that he was watching RAF helicopters in the air over Sedgefield and Trimdon in County Durham, evidently vying for airspace with TV choppers.

‘Police are reporting a number of fatalities, at least two people feared dead, the same suspect in each case, currently in a vehicle.’

‘Carol,’ Blaylock uttered without looking to his secretary, ‘please can you get me the Durham Chief Constable on the phone?’

‘What we know – he’s been identified, his name’s Billy Darrow, he’s in a Ford Mondeo armed with a twelve-bore sawn-off and a twenty-two rifle. We’ve got multiple crime scenes. It looks very likely that he’s targeted certain individuals he’s borne a grudge against. Mind you, he’s shot at least one totally innocent bystander. So the message is out for people to stay indoors.’

‘Where’s it all begun?’

‘We got our first call about eleven, the neighbour of a woman named Joyce Fairlove, who’s Mr Darrow’s ex-missus. This neighbour
was away out to her car from her front door and saw Darrow shoot Mrs Fairlove on her own doorstep. Mrs Fairlove had her daughter with her, her and Billy Darrow’s kid, and the child runs screaming to the neighbour who locks them both in and calls us. Darrow, he legs it, he’s off.’

‘The daughter’s safe now?’

‘Aye, safe, but Mrs Fairlove was gone by the time the ambulance got there. From there Darrow’s drove into the village – we get a call about shots fired, he’d shot Mrs Fairlove’s solicitor dead then shot someone who just got in his way as he’s driving off. A constable who’d heard the radio call was near enough to get after him, but he got in a collision with another of our cars arriving to the scene. The latest I’ve just heard is Darrow’s brother’s been found dead in Trimdon. Talk is there’s a lot of bad blood in that family.’

‘How close are you? To snagging him?’

‘We’ve had officers in pursuit since the first call, we’ve just not been lucky yet. But I’ve every armed officer out, choppers supporting us, support from every neighbouring force – we’ll get this man, Mr Blaylock.’

‘I’ll take no more of your time, Chief.’

He watched the TV screen as a photograph filled it, the snapped face immediately if vaguely familiar – Blaylock felt the shock of recognition.

‘And this just in, Cleveland Police have named the gunman they are hunting as William Darrow, forty-six, from Port Clarence, and they have issued this photograph …’

Now he felt faintness creeping down his legs, as he realised that William Darrow had once sat before him in his surgery at the Arndale Shopping Centre in Thornfield. But whatever he had said, Blaylock had no recall, and no appetite for phoning the Thornfield office to find out.

Mark Tallis was instructed to come and get him out of Select Committee in the event of major developments in Durham. He met Phyllida Cox with a nod outside Committee Room Three, his grave demeanour seeming to ward away the truculence that had lately become her signature. Since she was off-guard, he attacked.

‘Anything to report on the hunt for our leaker?’

‘There is … no news.’

‘Why am I not surprised?’

They took their seats and Blaylock surveyed the familiar panel: relatively youthful Labour Members, reliably troublesome Tories, none of them ever to be counted sympathetic, with the possible exception of Nigel Rhodes, a Tory whose career had been entirely expended in committees and who occasionally sought favour by this route.

Centre-stage at top table Gervaise Hawley had a prim, exquisite air as he sifted his pages. Blaylock found it hard to see past the immaculate bulging knot of the man’s salmon tie. An aide came to pour a hushed briefing into his ear – regarding Durham, Blaylock assumed – and Hawley’s brow and the set of his mouth assumed consternation.

‘Good afternoon, Home Secretary. I gather there are urgent matters that have required your attention today. Thank you for joining us. We shall aim to be brisk. The Home Office seems suddenly to be coming apart under your stewardship, as a consequence of regrettable decisions on your part. Now there is the case of Mr Quarmby’s report, and the disreputable delay of its release. You seem to have tried to sit on it and rewrite its conclusions?’

‘Chairman, I respect Mr Quarmby’s expertise. His report had issues and needed work before publication. I don’t see that the leaking of it to the press is a minor concern. I don’t see that the problems the report discusses are greater than that of releasing misleading data.’

‘Well, Home Secretary, if you would let us see a
little
data now
and then it would surely be appreciated.’ Hawley put down a page. ‘Dame Phyllida, was the delay of this report necessary in your eyes?’