The Knives (39 page)

‘Forgive me, David, but you seem out of sorts.’

‘It’s a miserable time of year.’

‘That is a point of view, I suppose …’

He had indeed spent some time staring fixedly and gloomily at the walls. He had wondered all morning about the worth of showing up. But here he was, mainly struck anew by the arrangement of Amanda Scott-Stokes’s room and its many testimonials to high culture, as if this were a sufficient force to keep a man right-minded.

‘Talking, as you gathered, David, is the greater part of it. I can’t help you unless you can say what concerns you.’

But Blaylock couldn’t bear to describe his weekend in Thornfield, the wound of his dashed feelings for Jennie, the low hostility he harboured toward her new life, from which his exclusion seemed to be assuming a finality.

‘I had wondered, when you were a child …’

‘Oh Christ …’

‘Was it a strict household? How were your parents on discipline?’

Blaylock sighed. ‘My dad was in charge of it. Never let me get away with much. But, he never raised a hand. It would be a sharp word or a hard look. That was all it took. I hated to get wrong off him. Because generally I knew he was right whether I liked it or not.’

‘He never lashed out?’

‘Not at me. Nor my mother, before you ask. He’ll not have been a saint all his life. But you’re on the wrong horse going on about my dad.’

He shifted in his seat, feeling familiar tempos beating in his brow and through his shoulders, a storm of irritation.

‘Truth is, I maybe took the wrong example off my dad. I avoided physical conflicts as a young person, I would go to any lengths to tamp it all down instead.’

‘You never “lashed out”?’

‘No, what I’d say is that I lashed in. Things that angered me … I used them, like a whip, to push myself harder. I didn’t want to be angry, aggressive, I associated all that with … weakness.’

Having thought it and said it, he felt the word hang there between them. Dr Scott-Stokes looked at him with her slight, encouraging smile.

‘However,’ he resumed quietly, ‘I would say, in retrospect, that I was avoiding certain kinds of necessary confrontation.’

‘But then you joined the army. You ran toward confrontation.’

‘I don’t know any more what I did there. I’ve talked so much about it, I get accused of embellishing it and god knows what. I don’t know why I joined the army. Except that it was a mistake.’

‘Did the army make you a more aggressive person?’

‘Look, I’ve no regrets about any violence I was part of as a soldier, there was always a reason for it. The only things that live with me, that haunt me, are things I failed to do. In the face of violence. Failures of moral courage. Bad decisions I made as a leader, decisions other people paid the price for – yeah, those, they do … plague me.’

She was looking at him closely, concernedly, but silently. After long resistant stumbles down a path he was acutely conscious of the threshold they had come to. He looked away and past her to the grey of the window. It seemed to him he could open the door, or else leave it and walk away, live to fight another day, for what it was worth.

‘There’s no day I don’t think about things that happened … in Bosnia? There was something … I’ve never been able to bear the memory of … I stop myself thinking of it when it comes.’

Still she was silent. He felt light-headed, weak around his limbs. So much had to happen to bring him to this fork.

‘It was near the end of our tour. We were so nearly out of it. I led my platoon to a village, mainly Croat village, under siege by the Bosnian Muslims. Because the shoe was on the other foot, right?

‘We’d been told the villagers needed help, might need evacuating. There were mortars coming in, heavy fire, sniping … and a lot of terror. So we went in, and we found some very frightened, sorry-looking villagers holed up in a church – fifty or so. Handsome old place. But it had become just a refugee bedlam. With that creature smell … everything overturned, shot up, broken windows, coats laid out like skins, no light or heat.

‘We parked our vehicles round like a shield, ran a UN flag up the belfry. But the incoming just intensified. We fired back, but there was … real terror round us, and we, me and my men, we were right in it now. It was a big choice, if we got them out that was it, they became displaced peoples. But to leave them to the mercies of the Bosnian army …’

He shook his head. ‘So, I called for reinforcements, all the vehicles we could muster to evacuate. I explained, through my interpreter, how we’d do it, forming them into lines, running the gauntlet, women and children first, dozen or so in the back of each vehicle and no looking back. They were scared but they seemed to know they had to do it. Except for one girl who wouldn’t come out, literally curled up cowering in the confession box while her mother pleaded with her. Asked me would I get her out. She’d big wide eyes, buck teeth, looked malnourished. Her name was Rozi. What I did, I’d told the men not to hand out stuff but I had a roll of peppermints and I offered her them, said they were hers, and
she came, I got her to come out of the dark and join us.

‘Then we had to crack on. Our vehicles, three Warriors, got through and up the hill and backed up to the monastery. We got them all in a sort of order. But I wanted them sorted by size, not family, so we got everyone in for the space we had. We started shepherding. There had to be covering fire. We filled one vehicle, off it went. Then the next was all but done, and we’d room for one child, I thought. I was by the Warrior and I looked, Rozi was by the door of the church, I shouted for her to come. Just her, not her mother. I said, “Come on, don’t be scared!”

‘She
was
scared. I should have gone and got her. Why I thought it was job done and I’d saved the day … I just should have gone and got her.

‘She must have believed me – she got this purposeful face on, she ran out, stumbled, dropped the sweets I gave her. She got on her feet, looked at me, and at the sweets – like should she pick them up? Then she was hit. Sniper bullet. Direct to the head. And that was that. That was that. She just dropped like a stone to the grass and I knew.’

Dr Scott-Stokes put fingers to her lips. ‘Oh,’ she whispered.

‘I looked at her mother, and … as long as I live I’ll never not be seeing that woman’s face. Hearing the sound that came out of her.’

The doctor’s lined and lugubrious face seemed a mirror for the torment Blaylock had revived in himself. He felt tremors rise through his chest and succumbed, getting the back of his hand to his face to stifle a sob, then burying his face into his fingers as his upper body shook.

‘Aw god … I’m sorry.’

‘Please don’t say sorry, David …’

For some moments he could hear nothing but his own sobs and snuffles.

‘I understand, the cruelty of it … But the girl’s death was caused by the sniper. It wasn’t your—’

He looked up sharply. ‘No, no. I can’t let myself off like that. I don’t need to be told what my job was. I should have gone and got her. You have to do the thing you said you would the way you said you’d do it.’

‘Were you able to discuss this with anyone? Superiors? A counsellor?’

‘There wasn’t the time. Never the time. Listen, any number of men saw worse than me on that tour. I knew the pain some of them were in. You just had to live with it. For me it was going back after the war, volunteering. Before I … before Jennie and I got together.’

‘You told Jennie about this?’

‘No. No way. What could she do about it? It would have … impaired me, too much. I needed to be someone else with her.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She admired me as an ex-soldier who’d done noble things. Not some fuck-up. I liked that she thought that – I needed her to keep thinking that. Of course, in the end, I bloody showed her I wasn’t. I showed our children. In abundance.’

He rubbed at his eyes, looked up and blinked, shook his head and stared aside – miserable, depleted, unrelieved.

‘It seems to me in some ways you blame your ex-wife for not understanding you. But how much has she really known?’

‘Well … it’s done now, Amanda, so …’

‘David, the things we can’t forgive ourselves for – they’re far more damaging than things inflicted on us by others. Because there’s no escape from the offender. The anger turned inward, the “lashing-in” you describe … I think you need to give some thought as to how you could forgive yourself.’

He could not keep derision out of his deep sigh. ‘Sorry, that seems to me … impossible. Selfish. A religious thing, like going to a priest. I’m surprised you’d even suggest it.’

She looked stern. ‘I don’t mean to load it with connotations of
virtue. That is wholly secondary, the question is what serves a patient’s needs, what might relieve the mental and physical stress of chronic anger. Which is why I propose we discuss it.’

‘Amanda, I just wish to god it hadn’t happened. To her, and, utterly selfishly, to me. Yeah, one side of my head could say it forgives the other. But the other’s not going to be fooled. It’s not for me to forgive myself. I don’t have the right, it’s too late. The only person who could forgive me is dead.’

‘Oh David, but to see it that way is hopeless.’

‘Yes. You’re right. Yes.’

He stood up.

‘I’m sorry, I realise how it seems … and I think we just need to conclude our business here. Thank you for listening.’

She did not move from her seat yet seemed very sombre. ‘If you leave this now, David, what have you achieved?’

‘I talked, you listened. It wasn’t nothing … We agree, I’ve done some regrettable things. But I believe I can change, things happen that change you, people, events …’

‘David, I’m sorry, forgive me, my fear is you will just continue to bury your problems. You say “regrettable things”. I’m afraid I could all too easily see you do worse—’

‘Goodbye, Amanda,’ Blaylock snapped, shaking his head and heading directly for the door.

He stood exposed, bracing himself against a squalling wind that seemed to want to blow him sideways to the tarmac. If there was no dream day to be visiting a windswept parade ground, Blaylock thought this one notably bleak – a sorry way to spend the year’s last day of work and the last of its daylight hours. Even the shelter of the corrugated iron hangars and outbuildings of Longmoor Military Base was off-limits, for Blaylock was required to be beside Commissioner Bannerman at the perimeter of the ground, ready to inspect the troops performing for his benefit. Blaylock didn’t care for the view, or the company, or for anything much about the shape of his life, but he was aware that others gathered for the session were about to have it tougher.

Some of the officers looked less assured than others hefting their long shields, clad in the full anti-riot dress of black-visored helmets and ballistic body armour. But their opposition for the day, loitering at the opposite end of the ground, were not offering a hugely intimidating prospect, in their ill-fitting vests and caps and hoodies, clutching beer-can props – either, Blaylock assumed, warranted officers having a lark or some underemployed spear-carriers from the National.

A moaning klaxon broke out on the air. Armoured Land Rovers moved forward, lights ablaze, sirens going, then pulled up, allowing more officers to disembark, urged on by the hoarse cries of their drill supervisor, a squat Ulsterman with a thick moustache.
‘Move! Move yerselves forward! And get beating on them shields!’

Close behind the officers trundled the six-wheeled water cannon, a blank-eyed beast of a vehicle copiously bolstered by cameras, speakers, barrels and searchlights.

‘I generally think just the look of these things is worth the cost of them!’ Bannerman shouted to Blaylock over the wind.

‘Yeah, we had ’em in Belfast!’ Blaylock shouted back. ‘They tended to get you running the other way!’

A heavily amplified warning blared from the cannon’s tannoy.
‘Attention, this is a police message, disperse at once or water jets will be fired.’

The roof-mounted barrels were moving, a siren kicked in, and the water jets started to soak the ground in front of the vehicle’s wheels. Then the pressure was jacked up, and the officers on foot hastily shifted to wider, warier positions. The cannons began to strafe directly before the pack of pretend demonstrators, who took to their heels in a manner Blaylock thought highly convincing as a mist came off the tarmac from the formidable measured sweep of the jets.

‘What’s the optimum pressure?’ Blaylock shouted.

‘No higher than what you’re seeing!’ Bannerman shouted back. ‘Obviously if someone got it in the head they’d be in trouble!’

Now Blaylock saw one of the faux anarchists take a hit from the cannon directly to the small of his fleeing back, pitching him forward to the ground where he scrabbled with both hands in hapless disarray.

‘How much does it hurt, do you think?’ Blaylock shouted.

Bannerman grinned. ‘Do you fancy finding out, David? We can loan you a spare hoodie …!’

‘I appreciate you might be minded to direct the operation yourself, Home Secretary, and it’s not to say we can’t use a good wingman on the scene, but be assured, this time round you can stand yourself down.’

Bannerman seemed to be amusing himself. They were back inside the hangar, served with steaming tea, and the Commissioner, flanked by a stern Deputy Chief Constable with publications on civil disorder to his name, briefed Blaylock formally on their intelligence and operational plans.

‘All leave has been cancelled for City of London officers, and we’ll have men stationed with Land Rovers at all of these points where property’s most likely at risk. You’re going to be treated to the virtuous sight of big police numbers, David …’

Blaylock let the jibe run off. ‘Tell me how you’re prepared for smaller threats – splinter groups, surprise tactics and that.’

‘Of course, you got blindsided on Mr Colls’ patch in Kent,’ Bannerman murmured over his mug. ‘But that was a mere media stunt. Capitalising on inexperience.’

The DCC took over. ‘We know protesters have prepared for months – we’ve had good sight of what’s being shared. Obviously we expect factions, blocs within the protest, with divergent aims and tactics. Some of it will be non-violent protest, tactical frivolity—’

‘Excuse me?’ said Blaylock.

‘Pranks,’ Bannerman grunted. ‘Like what happened to you in Kent. There are always these little mobs. But we don’t anticipate the storming of the Winter Palace. Certainly not by a horde of adolescents and undergraduates.’

Blaylock sat back, sceptical. ‘One thing I’ve observed from recent melees – I think you need more emergency first aid on site.’

‘Your concern is touching, and noted. Obviously our duty as a police service is to enable peaceful protest. But if we have to scoop up any youngsters they’ll all be treated as well as the rest.’

Blaylock began to pack up, mindful of the time, the trail back to London, and the last chores outstanding – mindful, too, of Bannerman keeping an eye on him as he nursed his mug of tea.

‘What’s it all about, eh? Young people, their whole lives ahead
of them, so far out of their depth in this protesting lark … It’s the parents I feel for.’

Blaylock could not escape the sense that Bannerman was jibing him again, somehow. But then the Commissioner’s momentarily penetrative gaze gave way to the condescending tolerance he knew of old.

Two hours later he was squaring away his desk for the year, moodily drawing some red lines down a budget report, when Geraldine entered, bearing the familiar folder, the ritual despatch from MI5. ‘Some urgent warrants just came in, David …’

Blaylock opened the folder with a strong disinclination to his usual close inspection or token query, intending just to append his signature and be done. The clutch of warrants, however, was thicker than he had anticipated. He was on the point of picking up the hotline to Adam Villiers when his main desk phone rang and Geraldine advised him that the Foreign Secretary was calling.

‘David, I thought you should know, MI5 has just sent me a surveillance warrant to authorise, the grounds being that it concerns an individual you’re acquainted with, so can’t sign for. Is that right?’

‘I’ve no idea, Dom, who are we talking about?’

‘Sorry, just one moment … A Mr Sadaqat Osman?’

Blaylock went directly on foot to Thames House, where Adam Villiers received him in his fifth-floor office.

‘Mr Osman lit up the radar a while back, it’s true, we knew him to be an associate of an associate of a person of interest … a college classmate of his from ten years ago? But overnight we heard something to concern us. He was, we established, the other party in a conversation with a separate individual under watch.’

Villiers hit PLAY on his black tablet. Blaylock listened to two
voices discussing a ‘marriage’ in fraught tones, one of them clearly quite young, the other clearly Sadaqat.

‘… But you have to want to challenge that weakness in yourself if you want to do something with your life, yeah? You’ve got to want to cleanse it from your heart. If you don’t … well, then you are better out of this thing.’

‘You, you’re sure yourself?’

‘I will go through with my intention, yes, I will be married.’

When the room was silent Villiers studied Blaylock’s disquieted face. ‘Mr Osman is, in fact, already a married man?’

‘He is.’

‘Of course. The handset on which he received the call is his wife’s. So the covertness, the obvious use of code that, I hasten to add, we have been hearing in other places – these are concerns.’

‘Who’s the other man on the tape?’

‘Said al-Allam, a young cousin of an old college friend of Mr Osman’s – Abul Rahman, whom we’ve had on warranted surveillance in recent months.’

‘They’re in league?’

‘Mr Osman and Mr Rahman are not thought to have been close since they both graduated from SOAS nearly a decade ago. But they seem to have rediscovered some shared enthusiasm. Said al-Allam and Mr Osman we don’t believe have ever met in person. But that’s part of the trouble.’

Blaylock recognised Villiers’s habit, whenever their business took on a notable gravity, to start to speak in riddles.

‘Are you aware Sadaqat’s line of work for some years has meant dealings with a lot of troubled young men – men who’ll have likely come to your attention at one time or another?’

‘That he has been thought to be good with young men? Relating to them, the issues they have? Yes. Mr Osman was employed by the Hardy Street Mosque? We’ve established that he left under something of a cloud. He was given rooms in the basement that
the trustees felt he put to dubious uses. Weightlifting, not pious discussion. Even before he turned to his good works in the third sector some of his previous endeavours were a little more offbeat. Three years ago he visited family in Peshawar; I’m not convinced it was family he spent his time with …’

Blaylock felt himself back in the cave – in the darkness, insecure, footing unsure, his good senses disabled. The concern that he could have been so badly wrong thrummed through him. The notion that others might yet rescue him from folly was a lifeline – but a demeaning, debilitating one.

‘I appreciate you may resist the deduction from this.’

‘I do. I met this man, talked with him, spent time with him … I made a judgement about him, Adam.’

‘Of course. As, now, have we. You should not chastise yourself. You would not be the first to have been fooled. I do appreciate these matters are testing. However, it is important to me that you have faith in us, our judgement, as you say.’

‘It’s Dominic Moorhouse who’ll decide.’

‘He already has, David.’

Villiers’ arms had been folded, but now he pressed his hands together at his chin – not worshipful but, rather, judgemental. Blaylock understood: he was meant to be examining his conscience, making a good act of contrition, pledging to sin no more.

‘In which case,’ Blaylock said finally, ‘there are, probably, some other associates of Mr Osman’s you ought to be looking at.’