The Knives (5 page)

‘The Leader of the Commons, Prime Minister.’

Francis Vernon, Vaughan’s dependable right hand for all unpleasant business, fixed Blaylock with his usual restive frown. ‘On that point – the prospects for the Identity Documents Bill are a concern for all of us. MPs are unsure what’s going on. There’s a raft of legislation before the House, Home Secretary, and you were given your slot some time ago. So what’s the big hold-up?’

Blaylock felt tension through his still-linked fingers as he gave
a gritted response. ‘I have said, more than once, that regrettably there has been political briefing against this bill from within our own ranks. So I’m not surprised backbenchers are confused. However, it is quite true that the bill carries special complexities with regard to human rights, data, cost, security, privacy—’

‘Yes, and yet, amazingly, we press on.’

Blaylock looked sharply at the interjector – Arts Secretary Belinda Ryder, in her former life a popular historian oft seen on television hiking up Greek hillsides, now the most conspicuous Cabinet rebel on civil liberties issues. Ruthven and Vaughan, however, were also glaring reproof at Ryder.

‘Belinda, with respect,’ said Blaylock, intending none, ‘these risks have never been taken lightly. We work to ensure the right solutions.’

‘David,’ Ryder rejoined, with the condescension she might show a layabout student, ‘those risks will never be resolved. To get the bill through is one thing, to live with it as law is a risk far greater.’

‘The Business Secretary, Prime Minister.’

Jason Malahide grinned. ‘David, it’s your baby, I’m sure you know all too well how much work needs doing to sort the mess out. And if your department’s mutinous I’m sure you can rough them up.’

Blaylock gave Malahide a long look, irritated by this show of support clearly meant to undermine, and by how much Malahide seemed to know about his department.

‘We will resolve the difficulties, and this bill will move forward.’

‘You say that, Home Secretary,’ Francis Vernon persisted, ‘but the perception is that it’s being put off and off while we struggle to work out how to do it. Meaning there’s a case we should just pull it.’

Now Blaylock was lost for words. The silence extended. The room then looked to the Prime Minister, the only man who could ‘pull’ a bill, and thus banish it to the boneyard forever – the only
man from whom ‘
Sort the mess out!
’ was truly an imperative.

Finally, the Captain pronounced. ‘Let’s be clear. We know the Home Secretary is doing what he believes in. I believe in it, too. If it were just the two of us who believed, that would be enough.’ With that he shut his folder, seeking no further comment. ‘So, I expect to see you all at the Carlton on Thursday night, a big gathering of our clan, show of strength, all that.’

Blaylock checked his watch – forty-four minutes. It was remarkable. To be precise, it was leadership.

Andy Grieve stood waiting by the Downing Street gates, where Blaylock advised they would walk back to Shovell Street. Andy conferred with police, the route was briskly agreed and Blaylock strode out, stiff from the morning’s exertion and his cramped seat at the Cabinet table. He was irked, too, by some of what he had heard.

Malahide was right: it was ‘a Tory government’, but by a gnat’s whisker and no more, propped up by deals cut with Ulstermen, and it was silly to pretend such a thin mandate permitted high ideological posturing from commanding heights. The party was comforted and emboldened overmuch by Labour having elected a new leader from its most pharisaical wind-bagging tradition. Still, the odds of Vaughan losing the next election to such a figure could not be discounted. The Captain, for all his wiles, had earned no laurels on which to rest. The pollsters said he was not seen as ‘popular in the country’, nor as ‘tough and no-nonsense’, nor even as ‘basically decent’ – much less ‘the choice of a new generation’. But the job, if thankless, had been keenly sought, and to Blaylock’s mind there was no use moaning about it.

Reaching into his jacket for his phone, Blaylock felt instead the envelope he had snatched from his hall table, and he seized the moment to part the seal and read. The letter was from Tamara Sahbaz, his old interpreter in Bosnia: she sent news that her son had begun college.

Tamara had informed him shyly of her pregnancy on the day Blaylock’s company departed Bosnia. Nine months later, in the week he resigned his commission, she had written to say she
and her husband had named the boy Davilo. ‘
And that is from gratitude to you, David
.’ A photo was enclosed. Davilo was dark-haired and dark-eyed like his mother, though he towered over her. Blaylock felt something in his chest, some offshoot of the pride in one’s own, and a gladness that the boy was growing up with such promise.

It disturbed him, still, to think of how easily this might never have happened – by a hair’s breadth, a hair-trigger. Stari Vitez had been a vulnerable outpost. If the Croats felt they were losing ground elsewhere in the war, it was simple redress for their snipers to take it out on the villagers of Stari Vitez, who tended to stay indoors lest they offer a target. Tamara, though, had to be always on the move, and gradually Blaylock realised – from the bullet-holes pocking every bricked surface – that the snipers considered her a prime scalp. Each time he had watched her go warily on her toes across the duckboards over the mud he had felt a special dread, fearing the sudden crack and thump of sniper fire.

Even now, under a milky sun in Westminster, Blaylock had to shake his head sharply to dispel things he wished never to think of again, things that squatted there daily and nightly and reproached him.

He folded and re-pocketed Tamara’s letter as he turned into Shovell Street. Outside, the morning’s protesters had grown a shade more populous and louder still, and some of the reporters who hadn’t got him earlier had remained, doggedly. But Andy cleared his path.

As the lift doors were closing upon Blaylock Becky Maynard stuck a hand through the gap and pressed in beside him. ‘Oops!’ she sang, as if she hadn’t meant to intrude. ‘George Morley from the
Sun
called to ask if he could send one of his reporters on a jog with you tomorrow?’

‘Aw, not in a million years, Becky. I mean, howay.’

‘O-kay. So you know, there’s been some malicious editing of your Wikipedia entry this morning but we’re onto it.’

‘Sorry, my what?’

She passed him an online print-out, a potted biography of himself with a passage ringed in red ink.

‘We’re on it, as I say,’ Becky said to Blaylock’s frown. ‘Also, the
Correspondent
have a new politics person, her name’s Abigail Hassall and she’s been on about wanting the big interview with you? It would be one sit-down, maybe a day’s shadowing?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘She said you’re “a fascinating character”.’

‘Bet you spat out your coffee at that, Becky.’

Becky, however, merely blinked. She did not waver.

‘No. If it’s a woman and I’m “fascinating” it means she wants to talk about my ex-wife and all that. No chance.’

In his sights was the larger meeting room adjacent to his office and it was filling up, key personnel of the immigration team slipping past him and Becky, giving half-smiles and rather wide berths. Blaylock turned away, knowing nonetheless that Becky would not roll over.

‘I expect she’ll do a profile on you in any case.’

‘Then she can get all she needs off the internet.’

‘Would you go for a run round the park with her?’

Turning once more he saw Becky’s tongue was in her cheek.

‘As of tomorrow – and, so you know, for the foreseeable? – I’ll be doing my morning run in the gym.’

Eric Manning, Director-General of Immigration, was a neat and tidy fellow with gentle manners and a tendency to dress up bad news. Blaylock watched him polishing his designer spectacles as they sat, and he knew what was coming.

‘Well,’ Eric said and blew out his cheeks. ‘The figures are in and we do have a notable year-on rise in new migrants over the first six months of this year. Twenty-one thousand or so, to be precise.’

‘The net total of newcomers being?’

‘One hundred and seventy thousand, two hundred and nineteen.’

Blaylock pressed his forehead into the palms of his hands, involuntarily.
What if that was a city? How big would it be? York? Luton? My constituency?

He was surprised upon looking up once more to see faces round the table bearing expressions of concern, in particular his Junior Minister Guy Walters, the young, loyal, not terribly bright MP for Kingsworthy.

‘Home Secretary?’ said Walters. ‘Are you—?’

‘Sorry. Go on, Eric.’

Manning continued. ‘The rises are equal in EU and non-EU, but the latter remains ahead overall. But, there are some encouraging trends. Numbers of foreign students are down again.’

Bloody Malahide will be all over that
, thought Blaylock.

‘That said, some concerns in the other direction are a nine per cent rise in asylum applications, and a notable fall in the numbers of illegal migrants forcibly removed or leaving of their own accord. Also fewer Britons have gone off to live abroad, but we have rising numbers coming in from Spain, Italy, France – the wine belt, oddly.’

‘I’m all for southerners heading north,’ Blaylock murmured. Someone chuckled – Ben? But he was disconsolate. He yearned to see this issue afresh, not so wearied by the years, but it appeared intractable. And he had come to understand how it told on longer servers than himself – why staff who could hardly be considered
departmental veterans nonetheless looked suddenly aged and helpless.

The immigration system creaked. No available resources could be thought adequate, no figures truly accurate. And no truly talented staffers wanted anything to do with it, while those who were politely forced into it just served their time counting beans down in Croydon. Blaylock could all too easily imagine some of them, overwhelmed by the workload, afflicted by paralysis, pushing obstinate figures into a drawer and turning a key. He could picture secret lock-ups – warehouses, even – jammed with cabinets full of abandoned immigration case files. It was one of his second-order stay-awakes at night.

Indisputably of the first order, though, was the fact of party conference in a fortnight when he would be required to say that immigration was falling, which would, on present evidence, be to say that black was white. It was a party political problem, thus not one shared by the permanent civil service round the table, yet he was compelled to make everyone feel the urgency.

‘This is not good,’ said Blaylock, finally.

Eric cleared his throat. ‘It’s not
ideal
. But there is, if you like, an upbeat story to tell here, about people wanting to come to this country – hard-working people, contributing to our economy.’

‘Eric, I’d love to have that view, it’s obviously a sweet deal for coffee-shops to get their baristas from Bucharest. But the public think immigration’s too high and that it makes problems, and we said we’d lower it, so that is our mission and anything shy of that is a failure.’

‘That people believe it doesn’t make it so, not statistically. And it overlooks the wider benefits.’

‘In my constituency, in all the old industrial areas, people seem to feel it can reduce their opportunities in life. They’re not bothered by how cheap it is for Londoners to get a nanny or a cleaner or a loft conversion.’

‘Minister, we should be wary of broad-brush caricatures—’

Blaylock felt the reproof – dimly aware, as of a backache or toothache, that the picture he bore in mind of the hypocrisy of Londoners was near enough a picture of his ex-wife. Still, he rallied.

‘We also have to be wary of discounting what people say is their experience. They’re not to be damned as bigots or belittled as fools just for objecting to the rate of change in a place they thought they knew.’

He pulled up, judging from the looks round the table that he had begun to beat on a drum in a manner his audience found strident.

‘Look, if we all want to be relaxed about immigration we just have to show we have control of the numbers. Over a decade we’ve had several million more guests in this country than the public were bargaining for, and the levels keep ticking up. So, we need to ensure our guests are good guests. Right? And that we manage those levels, in a way that speaks well of diversity – not adversely. We have a sensible target of what the levels ought to be. Right now, we’re missing it. By a mile.’

Guy Walters, frowning, elbows on desk, raised a hand. ‘Eric says forcible removals are in decline. Then isn’t it time to get the troops out?’

‘What do you have in mind, Guy?’

Walters’s whole frame roiled with keenness. ‘As I understood it, we’ve got a database full of tip-offs from the public about illegals. Let’s get our Enforcement teams out on the road, make a big day of hunting these people down – house calls, spot checks at dodgy workplaces. Send a message, yes? If people think all we ever do is talk about clamping down then, hey, let’s get clamping!’

Blaylock pondered. The plan had a brute simplicity, rather in the manner of its author.

Ben Cotesworth, though, looked rattled. ‘David, there’s a big, big problem with that kind of tactic. People will say we’ve gone fishing – just based on gossip, on nosey neighbours. In that database you’ll have a whole load of hoax calls, malicious calls, rival curry-houses having a pop at each other. You’ll be taking the word of narks. And, yeah, bigots.’

‘Ben, I don’t doubt there’ll be a few wrong steers but, howay, we’re not Gestapo. If people have their papers on them then they can go about their business.’

‘It’s a
stunt
, but. It’s showbiz. A big hassle knocked off in a day just for headlines. If we want to do this we should at least do it right – review the data properly, plan it, use some stealth.’

Blaylock felt sharply what Ben was accusing him of – of trying to look big and tough and, rather, appearing cowed and small. He would not have suffered the charge from anyone but his protégé.

It was true: he believed he was responding to steady silent pressures exerted from beyond the door. He loathed the idea of decisions made solely to get out of a short-term hole, for naked political interest. He loathed it especially because he had done it before, once or twice or three times. And now – he could feel it coming over him – he was going to do it again. Because, in the end, he didn’t hate expedience half as much as he loathed inertia.

‘Guy, you’re sure we have the data to hand, in good order?’

‘Oh yeah. Fifty thousand tip-offs reported by the public. If we don’t get a thousand expulsions I’ll walk naked down Whitehall.’

‘We’ll see about that. But, yes, let’s get it done. How soon?’

‘God, I mean … why not this week? Friday?’

Blaylock nodded assent, and looked to Ben, who had folded his arms, sunk his chin in his chest and tilted back in his chair – a posture Blaylock used to observe in his son during the final grim months before divorce and exile from the family home.

As the team filed out Geraldine was there, looking custodial, and she steered Blaylock lightly by the elbow toward his office.

‘Some interception warrants have turned up in quite a batch, maybe you could sign them off now?’

Blaylock sat at his desk so as to treat with seriousness two dozen or so requests from MI5 to approve intrusive surveillance on select individuals – wire-tapping, room-bugging, plain-clothes observation.

The subjects were suspected Islamists in the main, plus a couple of Irish republicans, and a suspiciously shiftless Russian ‘tourist’. Blaylock read as carefully as he could. He refused to be cowed or made star-struck by the spooks – wanting, rather, to form his own judgements based on the evidence. He could not, however, scrutinise every warrant line by line. More often he was resigned to trusting these secret, untested hunches, these informed suspicions of conspiracy and wickedness. He felt some sort of force steering his hand as he scribbled his signature – the duty to protect, his duty as minister for the interior, hardened by the fear of what failure might constitute. The spooks were nameless and faceless to the public, but he was the poster-boy for national security; and if wickedness came to pass then the public would require a public figure, like a target, on whom it could pin the tail of blame.

The various Islamist suspects depressed Blaylock especially. Some looked like little more than young men with talents for delinquent nastiness, and driving ambitions, apparently supported by holy writ, to become nastier still. These were petty-criminal converts, for whom Islam seemed to be a handy means of rebranding the society against which they offended – the authorities that had, quite reasonably, punished them – as a den of corrupt
kuffars
. Others in the pile of warrants, though, appeared to be model pupils, ‘clean skins’, and yet observed to have been keeping company with existing ‘subjects of interest’.