Free The Knives by Richard T. Kelly Page A

heard of her.’
    ‘You sure? She was outside the building just now waving a bullhorn in people’s faces …’
    Dalton struggled to his feet and jerked a thumb toward a long window with a vantage on the Shovell Street entrance. Blaylock got up and followed.
    ‘And, sorry, who is she?’
    ‘She leads on policy for Custodes, the civil liberties lot? Quite the crusader. And hardly out of school uniform.’
    They peered through the window with their heads close together and could still make out a gaggle of demonstrators massed at the correct remove from the entrance. But the young woman withthe bullhorn appeared to have abandoned her post. On returning to his desk, however, Blaylock saw that a newly lodged petition sat atop his in-tray, calling for change in the conditions of women inmates awaiting deportation at detention centres. The covering letter bore the insignia of Custodes and the signature of Ms Madolyn Redpath.
    *
    Blaylock spent an hour on pointed business calls – ‘recorded meetings’ – with Cabinet colleagues, while Geraldine listened in on headphones, taking minutes amid pin-drop silence. Needing bones to throw to the cops, he secured from Simon Webster Justice’s continued funding for ‘neighbourhood courts’ to relieve police of processing blatantly guilty young offenders. Webster was blithe: ‘David, it’s a million saved in admin and court orders, so we’ll get top marks from Caroline.’
    He was done in time for his regular briefing from Griff Sedgley, leading silk at the chambers that took a lion’s share of Home Office briefs. Hawkish of feature, fastidious of collar and cuff, Sedgley exuded a leather-bound quietude by which Blaylock was always assured.
    Their chief item of business was the protracted extradition to the United States of Vinayak Khan, a Londoner wanted for trial by Homeland Security on charges of aiding and abetting known terrorists. Khan had committed his alleged offences nearly a decade ago in front of a computer screen in Willesden Green – a ‘web-spinner’, as Blaylock saw him, joining up cyber-threads such that bomb-making instructions could be cleanly relayed across continents, or a weapons training camp disguised as outward-bound adventure in the wilds of Oregon. The European Court of Human Rights maintained that extradition should not happen before the outcome of a final appeal to the Grand Chamber in Strasbourg, to which Khan’s lawyers had made strenuous presentation that he be tried in the UK.
    ‘I’m not withdrawing the extradition order,’ said Blaylock.
    ‘If you don’t,’ murmured Sedgley, ‘you could be found in contempt of court.’
    ‘That would be a not madly inaccurate assessment of my view. Let’s see how the judge responds to Strasbourg tomorrow.’
    They moved on to domestic business: eleventh-hour applications to overturn deportation decisions, most of them drawing on human rights law. A reformed Jamaican drug dealer, already booked on a flight back to Montego Bay, was poorly and pleading that he couldn’t hope to subsist anywhere but England. A Somali man with form for assault now awaited a plane to Mogadishu, but his lawyer argued that he would thence be in mortal danger from Islamist militants. To Blaylock the process always seemed a ladder, very often one step up and two back, there to tread on a snake and slip back to the start of things, where the press and MPs lay in wait to curse the Home Office for incompetence.
    ‘Geraldine, when do I get my sit-down with the new Lord Chief Justice?’
    ‘Lord Waugh’s office say he’s been chock-a-block but I’ll chase,’ said Geraldine, scribbling.
    ‘Now this one’, said Sedgley, ‘is at Special Appeals and you should know it’s looking … problematical.’ He passed Blaylock a set of papers marked Bazelli v Secretary of State for the Home Department . ‘Mr Bazelli is a Bosnian who came to the UK with his father twenty years ago.’
    ‘Fleeing the war?’
    ‘Indeed. He got