The Knives Read Online Free PDF Page B

young woman in a smart woollen coat, striding forward from among the chanting demonstrators, succeeded somehow in ducking through the press pack to point a bullhorn at his ear.
    ‘Home Secretary, do you think it’s right to deport an innocent woman to certain death?’
    The wincing reporters seemed to care no more than Blaylock for the query or its volume. And with that Blaylock was safely inside the relative hush of the reflective sanctum.
    He negotiated the full-body security gate through to the vaulting atrium that looked up to four floors of hive-like activity. Never did he cross this space without thinking of his arrival at the Home Office eighteen months previously: the formal ‘Welcome’ from staff, many of whom had thronged the atrium, more of whom stayed close to their posts, such that he had peered up and around the walkways and balconies while tight-lipped faces gazed down at him, and he had been struck by a mental image of himself brought before them in a torn shirt, bound by the wrists on the back of a tumbril.
    His route to the lifts was intercepted by Becky Maynard, tripping lightly down the stairs from Level One, a gleam of resolve in her eye such that Blaylock had rarely seen. It occurred to him he ought to hit somebody more often.
    ‘Bravo, Minister,’ said Becky, politely but firmly. ‘Just to say, I hear your position loud and clear, and if any big requests come in I’ll only run them by Geraldine just so you’re aware.’
    Then she was off again, before he could instruct her not to bother Geraldine either. Not for the first time Blaylock had the strange sense of being surrounded by women – formidable, all, with cool heads and level gazes. From their assessing looks he somehow always took the meaning that he ought to take a moment to turn aside and tuck himself in.
    He made it into a lift unhindered, ascended to Level Three, stepped out and strode past the cluster of offices occupied by his junior ministers and, more substantively, the department’s Permanent Secretary, before reaching the comfort zone of his own private office team: the engine room of the building, his eyes and ears and buffers, clever young people sifting high stacks of paper while speaking clearly and intently into phone receivers cocked between shoulder and ear.
    Geraldine – bespectacled, her unmanageable hair primped into a frizzy nimbus – came forward and greeted him with a nod towardhis office door. There, arms folded, clearly wanting a private word, stood his special advisor Mark Tallis. Tall, dimple-jawed, privately educated, Tallis was his spad with special responsibility for ‘press liaison’ and the one among them most aggrieved by having to sit out in open plan desk space, fully separated from his master by a stairwell. Civil Service fiat, however, had forced the spads away from any closer proximity, as if to degrade the imagined powers of their dark arts.
    ‘David, bloody good effort this morning, patrón .’
    ‘Cheers, Mark.’
    ‘You saw the Post , though, that toe-rag having a go—?’
    ‘Easy, just give me five minutes with Geraldine, okay?’
    She had moved silently to their side and Blaylock bade her into the office then shut the door behind them. His desk sat before the furthest window so as to make a dauntingly long walk for any bearer of bad news. But he and Geraldine took seats around the oval group meeting table parked midway, and she passed him the usual sheet of A4 confirming his day’s schedule. He frowned at an unexpected Item 1.
    ‘Sorry, but can you squeeze in Sheikh Hanifa and his friend from Russell College before Cabinet? Fifteen minutes?’
    ‘You mean they’re on their way?’
    ‘It did seem urgent …’
    Blaylock nodded. Geraldine then presented him with a pair of letters and he scanned them. The first, from Sir James Bannerman, politely notified him of what he had already read in the papers: that the ‘Sylvie Affair’ would be scrutinised internally. The second was on the