The Knives (40 page)

Andy and he were slumped into facing train seats, rumbling northward, both with steaming teas and bacon rolls before them, and Blaylock could nearly believe he saw his reflection in front of him, too. For Andy looked as beset and out of sorts as Blaylock felt – certainly not his usual ramrod-straight, taciturn self. In response to the simplest of cordial enquiries, perplexity poured out of him: the object of worry his college-age son, whom he’d had to stay for an unsatisfactory few days before the young man went to spend Christmas with his mother.

‘The effort he puts into being a bloody shirker. It’s not just slackness, boss, it’s insolence.’ Andy leaned in with an agitated confiding look, speaking
sotto
voce
. ‘He smokes draw and thinks I don’t know. The girlfriend’s been over, they have it off in his room then she’s out the door, not a word. He just lets on like the rules don’t
apply
.’

Blaylock had every sympathy, but no answer. He had heard worse things, no doubt. But it seemed to him that if the boy did not respect Andy then he surely respected no one.

They lapsed into silence and Blaylock gazed out at the flat expanse of Cambridgeshire, the dull and dispensable first hour of the journey. To be heading north had always felt to him a boon – hurtling up the length of the land, through Grantham and Newark to Doncaster, York, Darlington, the view a source of pleasure where others likely saw just fast-fleeting dullness. This was his England, the north his great good place to which he had
unerringly homed – to restart his life after the army, then to scout a place where he and Jennie could be wed, then to take newborn Alexander to see his grandparents, then the speculative treks of his quest to be adopted as parliamentary candidate. Where his old family ties had come loose he had made new ones, seemingly robust. Today, though, he had an unhappy sense of being twice estranged.

He hoisted himself from his seat. ‘Khazi,’ he told a distracted Andy, who looked for a moment as if he might get up and come along.

‘Easy, Andy, you know you don’t have to hold it for me.’

‘I’d have to find it first, boss.’

That was more like it, in Blaylock’s opinion. He grunted, steadied himself and lurched down the carriage to the swaying vestibule.

Up ahead he saw a figure rise from seated in the next carriage, parting the doors, and seeming suddenly to be coming straight for him – a strapping male, grave-faced, dressed for urban war in black combats and denims, yet Christ-like of beard and dark matted hair. Blaylock tensed up – but the man only ducked ahead of him and through the sliding door of the men’s cubicle.

As Blaylock turned and paced, rapping his knuckles absently on the vestibule wall, it dawned on him quite suddenly that he had seen this man before. Simultaneously, to his surprise, the man re-emerged, shot him a look of glaring intensity then lumbered off into the next carriage whence he had come, not stopping at his seat.

Warily Blaylock stepped into the cubicle, seeing at once that something was awry. A sheet of printed A4 had been plastered by its dampened corners onto the mirror over the sink.

Blaylock stepped closer and squinted to read the type.

Blaylock’s pulse rose. Something nagged in his throat as he swallowed. He clawed the wet page off the mirror, turned and felt his feet move him forward, out of the cubicle, through sliding doors to the next carriage, blindly following the path his messenger had taken.

He clocked every seated face as he passed, bored faces, some flickering into recognition of him. But he could not find his man, not in that carriage nor the next.

He reached the last vestibule, the front of the shuddering train, where chained bicycles were slumped in a shadowy nook before the driver’s cab. Then he spun sharply, sensing rightly that his messenger had emerged from gloom by the door.

‘You got it, right?’

‘Who are you, what do you—?’

The messenger dug into his black denim coat. Blaylock felt a lurch in his chest. What was produced and flashed unwaveringly for a few seconds was a Met Police badge and warrant card.

As Blaylock absorbed the disclosure and the messenger re-pocketed his ID, they both heard the crackle of a guard’s announcement.
‘We are approaching Peterborough, if you are leaving the train …’
The queasy odour of the brakes filled the cramped space. The messenger stepped nearer to Blaylock.

‘Your boy’s getting put in a fit-up, right? The raid, it’s going to happen, and stuff’s gonna get found, bet your life on it. Everyone in that place is getting nicked.’

Blaylock heard himself stammer. ‘No. Can’t be, I don’t buy it, Alex can’t be that deep in this—’

‘He’s not. He’s being led into it. Like a prize pig.’

‘Who’s leading him? You?’

‘Nope. You work it out.’ And he scoffed. ‘
Cherchez la femme
, yeah?’

‘Not the girl. Don’t tell me she’s a copper, too?’

He shook his head. ‘Snitch. She’ll walk away from it tonight, you can bet on that too. Not your boy, though. And by midnight the world’s gonna know.’

‘He’s only seventeen.’

‘Wise up. It’s not about him. It’s about you.’

Blaylock put a hand to his head as if he might still it. Through the window he could see the train easing down, rushing toward a sparsely populated platform. The messenger was clearly desperate to escape his confinement.

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘You got people don’t like you, Mr Blaylock. But it’s not your boy’s fault you’re his dad. Listen, do what you want, you can wait for the call from the station or hear it on the news. But they’re meeting tonight, five o’clock.’

He stabbed the release on the door and bailed out.

Blaylock turned, punchy, his feet unsteady under him, and started to run back the way he had come – only to see Andy coming powerfully down the aisle, visibly agitated, as if wanting to see past him.

‘Boss, you alright?’

‘No. Look, change of plan. Grab the stuff, we’re getting off.’

Blaylock was caged by the return journey, head pulsing, trapped in his chair and kicking the upright, feeling hemmed and harried by undesirable options on all sides. He could not decide what to do or whom to trust. Worse, Andy wanted to understand, and Blaylock could offer only tortuous half-truths.

‘I just have to see my son, it’s just … it’s as simple as that.’

‘But I don’t get it, boss. Can’t you call him?’

‘No, I – just, listen, I have to go fetch him, myself.’

Andy got on the phone and arranged a car at King’s Cross. Blaylock checked his watch, 3.37. As the train zipped through the environs of the Arsenal stadium he called the Islington house. Radka picked up, her wariness of him clear down the line.

‘Radka, do you know where Alex is?’

‘He is with his friend? They have gone for coffee, to hang out? He said he will be home seven, seven-thirty I think, when Mrs Kirkbride is home?’

‘Do you’ve any idea where they’ll have gone? I’ve something for him, you see, for Christmas …’

‘He said the Nomad café? Near City College?’

They surged out of the car on the Holloway Road and strode into the café, bringing the cold of the street with them. Andy pulled his badge and went directly to the bleach-blonde barista while Blaylock stood scanning the moodily lit space with darting eyes.

‘Have you seen a boy, about seventeen? With a girl, a girl with long red hair? Red like scarlet?’

‘Uh, they paid and left like five minutes ago?’

Blaylock shoved at the door, Andy already on his heels.

He broke into a jog in the direction of the nearest underground stop. It was hopeless. Before them in the dark and the cold was a pre-Christmas pavement throng, a heedless mass of bodies blindly in their way.

And then ahead, under the yellowy illumination spilling out of a newsagent’s by Holloway Road station, Blaylock could make out two figures, their shapeless duds fringed with light, that mane of scarlet hair. He began to run, hearing Andy’s strides fall harder behind him.

Through the threshold of the station they saw, beyond the ticket barriers, lift doors closing. Andy held aloft his warrant card, flashed it all around and, without hesitation, vaulted across the
barrier and headed for the stairwell. Blaylock, borne forward by momentum, did likewise, jarring his knee against metal but clearing the hurdle.

Two steps at a time they leapt down the staircase, into the bowels of the station, skittering onto the tube platform in time to see a southbound train, its doors open. Blaylock looked both ways frantically, but the platform was deserted from end to end. A beep sounded to indicate the imminent closure of the doors.

‘Boss, it’s got to be this one!’ Andy shouted and lurched aboard the train. Blaylock followed, wrenching his coat-tails free of the doors.

On the tube, perspiring, adrenalin coursing through his body, he felt curious eyes on him and looked down and left and right and then at Andy, trying to bring his breathing and agitation under control.

The train pulled into Caledonian Road and they both bustled off, Blaylock’s gaze searching twenty yards down the platform – and finding his son’s familiar frame and Esther’s siren-like head as the pair headed to the exit. For the first time in two hours Blaylock felt his breath coming easily again.

They kept their targets discreetly in sight on the dim-lit pavement up ahead; Andy had summoned the driver; and now all that pulsed through Blaylock was the desire to finish the exercise. For Alex and Esther had now linked hands, and the surpassing strangeness of the pursuit had begun to make Blaylock feel vaguely disreputable, even as he resisted the thought of the greater unpleasantness that surely had to follow.

They had entered a deserted street. Just as Blaylock felt it was the moment to strike he saw the young pair pause. Esther, on tiptoe, craned her vermilion head so as to kiss Alex’s willing mouth.

Blaylock felt sick. Perhaps something of his discomfort was borne in the air for, as the kiss concluded, Alex turned and finally
saw his father and Andy Grieve together ten yards hence. The alarm on his face was all Blaylock needed for a cue, and he strode toward them.

‘Alex, you have to come with me.’

‘Dad – what the actual
fuck
—?’

‘You’re not going to this meeting. Not tonight, not any night, this ends now.’ He bit off the words, keeping them low.

‘What fucking meeting?’

For a cold instant Blaylock truly wondered if he was not, in fact, colossally mistaken, thoroughly played. ‘C’mon. I know where you’re going, what you’re up to. You’ll not go. I’m taking you home.’

‘You’re not taking me anywhere, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But then Alex looked to Esther, and in his searching eyes and her visible horror Blaylock was sure he knew the gospel truth.

‘I could take you straight to a police station. Cut out the middleman? I’d rather that than have you walk into a trap.’ He rounded on Esther. ‘You, tell him! Is everything going to be okay? It’s not, is it?’

Esther turned and ran. Andy lurched as to pursue her but Blaylock laid a staying hand on him. ‘Leave her, Andy.’

Alex, however, was moving, too, and Blaylock instinctively grabbed a handful of his chambray shirt. ‘Alex, I know it seems—’

There was stunning enmity in the boy’s eyes. He shrugged himself free and started to run, too, but now Andy caught his arm and Blaylock seized him by the shoulders, the boy writhing and shoving back with every sinew.

‘I can’t
believe
this! You fucking
spy
on me?’

‘Alex, stop it.’

‘You’re a sick bastard, I fucking
loathe
you!’

Blaylock grabbed the back of his son’s head and jabbed a finger at his face. ‘Alright, that’s
enough
, I
warned
you, didn’t I? You
think you know better than me? You’ve no clue, son, you don’t know you’re
born
, so shut your bloody mouth.’

Belatedly – after all the accumulated tension and anxiety of the day, now seeing his son’s fury turn to alarm before his eyes – Blaylock began to comprehend the size of the hole he was in.

On the ride back to Islington he ignored successive calls but as the Jaguar turned into Alwynne Road he saw Gilchrist’s Cherokee on the gravel. Before they had parked Alex launched himself out of the door.

‘Keep him away from me!’ he shouted as he stomped into the light and warmth of the house, past Radka and his mother.

Now Jennie came toward Blaylock, visibly beside herself. ‘David, what the hell’s been going on?’

‘I had to see Alex and I had to talk to him, urgently. My hope is he’ll tell you himself what he was up to.’

‘Why the hell can’t you?’

‘Because I just can’t, okay? What I can tell you is he was about to get himself in serious bother, like I said he would. He’s not to see that girl again either, that’s a fact.’

Jennie was looking at him with sorely aggrieved eyes, a look he had so dearly hoped to have seen the back of. ‘Oh David, for Christ’s sake, what is going on with you? I so,
so
do not need this. Not now. I mean, can you not understand that?’

‘Of course I understand, can we not talk inside like normal people?’

‘There’s nothing normal about this! Are you mad?’

‘I told you, he’s just been going blindly down this road, it fell to me to step in—’

‘Oh bloody nonsense, you tell me what in god’s name you mean.’

‘I
can’t
tell you, Jennie, there are just some things where you and every other bugger just has to trust me—’

‘David, don’t give me that—’