The Knives Read Free Page B

he took as his birthright, Blaylock pounded the pavement and the pavement pounded him back. Alice in Chains raged into his ear from the iPod Nano affixed to his right bicep.
    He was thinking, again, of the ludicrous levels of fitness to which Sandhurst had raised him twenty years before – tabbing twenty miles up a hillside, thirty-kilo Bergen on his back. It was a laugh, a short one, at his expense. All that had been a stiff ascent to a peak with nowhere to go: a hard-won accumulation of physical capital that he had spent, steadily, ever since resigning his commission. These morning runs were a rear-guard action, a Maginot defence against the gravity of time. Still, the wish to be again that lean and focused force going forward, parting the air in his wake – Blaylock felt it keenly.
    Yesterday had been a bad day at the office, and another unpromising one lay in the offing. The whole week, in truth, looked like trouble. But he clung to his conviction that to put in a good shift on a bad day was a virtue that repaid itself tenfold. Whenever he said this to his colleagues they smiled and nodded, as if they would follow him into the thick of any fight. Somehow, though, whenever he glanced back over his shoulder, he didn’t see them there.
    He looked behind him now – looking for the other running man he knew to be close at his heels, the dependable presence, his reliable rival. And there was that man, in his black tracksuit, looking plenty lean and focused and air-parting, albeit twenty yards short of Blaylock.
    That’s right, kidder. You stay in your lane.
    Blaylock ran on through gates and into his circuit of Kennington Park, upping a gear to dart by a young blonde swaying languidly down the path, still in summer clothes, wand-like from behind. As he did so he witnessed a conjuror’s trick – a stunning trompe l’œil – for from the front she was bulgingly pregnant, to the point of capsizing.
    September baby. You’ll have a clever one. Just like my September boy. Too bloody clever …
    Exiting the park and heading up Kennington Road he lengthened his stride. It wasn’t a race – he was daft to think so. Yet the thought did persist. Some streak was driving him to outrun his fellow jogger yards behind – shake him off, leave him in the dust – if only to change the given, rock the guy’s apparent complacency.
    And so Blaylock accelerated, hitting the pavement harder, past the yellow-brick Peabody Estate, past Toni’s Caff and the shabby corner-shop cluster, past the fine Georgian white-stucco terrace, the squat pub, the unloved low-rise flats, doorsteps where bagged rubbish aggregated.
    A throb in his calves was on the cusp of outright painful. He could feel, could hear, his rival behind, pacing himself like a solid middle-distance man, as if poised at the shoulder for the toll of the bell.
    Abruptly Blaylock eased down, having reached the short promenade of local shops – Colin’s Furniture, Ranjiv’s Chemist, Dev’s Corner News. He jogged over to Dev’s show-bin of the daily newspapers in their grid behind a scuffed clear plastic flap.
    My sacrificial altar, my daily pound of flesh.
    The tabloids all proclaimed versions of the same thing: ‘SYLVIE: TOP COP COVER-UP?’ All ran with the same now-familiar photo of the victim, the sunny fair-haired sixth-former in her heartbreaking school pullover and tie. Blaylock, father of two daughters, couldn’t stand to see it any more. But the summer’s banner news story wasn’t going away, and the papers had found grounds to revive its pain. ‘ Every day brings reminders ,’ Sylvie’s father said. ‘ We’re haunted .’
    One bright day in April Kevin Clail, twenty-eight, had struck Sylvie Jordan, sixteen, with a half-brick then dragged her unconscious body into parkland where he had raped her and stabbed her to death, and where her body was later found by a group of younger children from her school. A woman who saw Clail hasten from the park had helped