The secondment to Merseyside police came as a considerable jolt. Liz knew that at some stage, as part of the training programme, she would be sent off on attachment to learn how a provincial police force and its Special Branch worked, but she wasn’t expecting it so soon. And Liverpool was alien territory to her – she had never been further north than Nottingham.
It was the period before the Peace Process had taken hold in Northern Ireland and she was one of a team collating intelligence on the threat from the Provisional IRA. Liverpool had an established community of Irish expats, many with nationalist sympathies and a few with actual links with the Provos. The Special Branch had some sources that from time to time provided useful intelligence, so she’d already had some dealings with Merseyside Special Branch officers and she had not much liked them. As she’d travelled up on the train to Liverpool that gloomy, showery day she was feeling nervous.
As it turned out she had good reason to be, but not because of the IRA. In the police headquarters’ rectangular red office block near the docks, a gloomy middle-aged sergeant with a pencil behind his ear had sent her upstairs with a grunt and a jerk of his thumb. One floor up she found a large open-plan room with a dozen or so desks in untidy rows, about half of them occupied by men, some young, some middle-aged, some in shirtsleeves, some in leather jackets, some typing, some talking on the phone. Cigarette smoke hung in the air in a blue uncirculating haze.
Every man looked up as Liz came into the room. She asked where Detective Inspector Avery could be found, and one of them pointed to the back of the room where a small office had been partitioned off with opaque glass. As Liz walked through the rows of desks, someone gave a low wolf whistle. Liz tried not to react, but she felt herself blush.
She knocked on the door, and a gruff voice said, Come in. Opening the door, she found a wide-shouldered man in shirtsleeves, with a tie pulled down an inch or two from his collar. He looked close to retirement age, and had greying hair cut very short, though he had let his sideboards grow in some misguided youthful impulse.
Avery looked annoyed by her interruption. ‘What can I do for you, miss?’
‘DI Avery?’ The man nodded. ‘I’m here from Box 500,’ said Liz, using the acronym by which the police referred to MI5. ‘My name’s Liz Carlyle.’
He stared at her. ‘You’re Carlyle?’ He sounded astonished. ‘I was expecting a George Carlyle, or a John Carlyle, or even a Seamus Carlyle. But nobody said anything about a Liz Carlyle.’ He was looking at her with distaste; Liz didn’t know what to say. Avery suddenly added, ‘I suppose you’re a graduate.’
‘Yes.’ Never had she felt less proud of it.
‘Good. You’ll be used to reading then.’ He pointed to three stacks of papers on a side table. ‘You can start with them. I’ve got more important things to do than read bumf from the Home Office all day. Come back in the morning and you can tell me what’s in it.’
After this welcome, Liz reckoned things would have to get better. She was wrong. By her third day she had acquired a nickname – Mata Hari – but not much else in the form of contact with her new workmates, whose initial curiosity was swiftly followed by the hazing rituals of an American college fraternity. The first morning when Liz went to the desk she had been allocated, she found a large cigar lying on the desk top. An hour later when she came back with a cup of muddy coffee from the vending machine in the hall, she found that someone had moved the cigar suggestively to the seat of her chair. While the men around her watched surreptitiously she broke the cigar in half and threw it in the wastepaper basket.
The next morning another cigar was in place. Again Liz threw it away, and this time she said loudly, without looking around, ‘I hope you boys can put cigars on expenses. If this goes on, it’s going to cost you a fortune.’
All week she ate lunch alone and saw no one after work. The only other woman in the office, the typist for DI Avery, was a middle-aged woman called Nellie who came in at exactly nine in the morning and left at precisely five at night. She had clearly never read Germaine Greer or heard of sister-solidarity; she made a point of ignoring Liz.
Not all the men joined in the harassment. Some just ignored her and one in particular was quite polite – McManus, a tall, sharp-featured detective sergeant who dressed better than the others.
The work itself was dull, a relentless progress through mind-bogglingly dense papers from the Home Office. Liz was desperate to get her teeth into something real; otherwise she would finish her secondment without knowing any more about how a police force ran than she had when she came. She resented Avery’s using her as an intellectual dogsbody, covering his back in case some civil servant expected a response to one of the documents sent seemingly by the truckload from Whitehall and Scotland Yard.
The harassment persisted, though not any longer with cigars. Purvis, a tall man with a dimple in his chin, seemed particularly intent on making Liz feel unwelcome. ‘Ask our new graduate colleague,’ he would say when someone had a question at the weekly briefing meeting.
Liz ignored this as best she could, but it made for stressful working hours, and she wasn’t sure how long she could put up with it in silence. Part of her was determined not to let these bastards get to her; another part wanted to run back to London. Then one morning she arrived to find a bundle of dirty shirts on her desk, with a note pinned to them. Washed, ironed and folded by Thursday please. She felt the eyes of the room upon her as she stood by her desk. Suddenly furious, she picked up the shirts, walked over to the open window and dumped them out into the alley below.
And then things changed – whether because she’d shown she’d had enough or because some of the men had begun to feel embarrassed, she never knew. As her third week in Liverpool was drawing to a close, she was sitting looking at what seemed an undiminished stack of typescript pages when McManus stopped beside her desk. ‘That looks interesting,’ he said, pointing at a Home Office circular on top of the pile.
She looked up at him warily. ‘It’s absolutely entrancing,’ she said dryly. ‘I’d be happy to tell you all about it.’
‘No, thanks.’ McManus paused for a moment, and she watched him as he seemed to be making up his mind about what to say next. He was a good-looking man – and he seemed to know it. Not my type, Liz told herself; her last boyfriend had been a gentle guitar player at Bristol. Besides, McManus must have been fifteen years older than she was. There was no way she was interested in him.
‘Fancy joining us on a little mission?’ he said lightly. ‘Or are you chained to your desk?’
‘I’m just following orders,’ she said, nodding towards Avery’s office.
‘Boss is in Manchester today, so why don’t you come along?’
She hesitated, but anything was better than reading any more bumf. ‘OK. What is it?’
‘I’ll explain in the car.’
Outside they joined two detective constables, Cardew and Purvis, who looked surprised when McManus explained Liz would be joining them. He added, ‘You boys go ahead. We’ll see you there.’
Cardew, who Liz suspected had been the wolf whistler on her first appearance in the office, rolled his eyes. McManus gave him a look and he and Purvis stomped off to their car.
McManus drove her in his black Range Rover away from the Docks and towards the eastern suburbs of the city. It was unseasonably warm and Liz put her window down as the evening turned from dusk to dark. The smoky yellow of sodium lights lined the streets in glowing dots. They climbed a bit and were going past a series of large institutional-looking buildings, a few modern but mostly Victorian. ‘Where are we?’ asked Liz.