Cardew came over and spoke through the open window of the passenger seat. ‘No trace. The boys are out combing the streets but it looks as if they’ve got clean away. We don’t know the car and we’ve got no description so there’s not much chance. Jesus, Guv, we were wondering what the hell Mata Hari was doing, driving down like that.’
McManus stared at him. ‘She was saving my life, Officer, while you were sitting picking your toes. And don’t call her Mata Hari. Her name is Liz.’
Chapter 6
Word spread quickly in the Special Branch office that Liz had saved McManus’s skin and the atmosphere got a lot more friendly; even Nellie the typist began to talk to her. When Avery stopped offloading Whitehall’s paperwork onto her and started asking her to analyse the intelligence reports coming in from Belfast to see if they threw up any leads to local activity, she felt that at last she’d been accepted as someone who might have something useful to contribute.
That wasn’t all that changed. Looking back on it now, she supposed it had been inevitable that after their run-in with the IRA she and McManus would be drawn together. Their shared danger formed a bond which at first made them friends, and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, something more than friends.
It didn’t happen right away. McManus was cautious about getting involved with the Spook, the woman from MI5, and at first he was just cordial. Three days after the drama of what they now all accepted had been an assassination attempt, he casually asked her to join him for a drink – but when she walked into the pub she saw that Purvis and Cardew were sitting at the table with him. A week later he asked her again, this time on his own, but before he’d even got her a drink, he was called on his mobile and had to go – an informant had been arrested for benefits fraud and he had to sort things out.
A few days later she had left her car at a local garage for its MOT on her way to work and to her annoyance the garage had rung late in the afternoon to say the car wouldn’t be ready until the next day. She was waiting for a bus down the street from the office when a man’s voice called out, ‘Want a lift?’
She turned, ready to tell the man to buzz off, when she saw it was McManus at the wheel of a smart Audi. He lifted his hands in mock-surrender. ‘Don’t shoot. It’s only me.’
She laughed. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Looking for damsels in distress. Hop in.’
‘What happened to the Range Rover?’ she asked as she got in.
‘Strictly for operations,’ he said, as he accelerated away. ‘This one’s mine. Now where are you going?’
When she told him he gave a little groan. ‘That’s a very respectable address.’
‘Well, of course,’ she replied with a grin. ‘I’m a very respectable person. The lady who owns the house is the widow of some former contact of the Service. I don’t know the details. I’ve got a couple of rooms on the top floor.’
‘I bet she watches you like a hawk. That can’t help your social life.’
Liz suppressed the temptation to ask, What social life?
‘Tell you what,’ said McManus, glancing sideways at Liz, ‘why don’t you come back to my place for a drink? Then I’ll run you home,’ he added quickly, as if he didn’t want to scare her off.
He accelerated past a dawdling queue of cars, his eyes straight ahead. Liz considered what to say. She sensed her answer was going to make a big difference to her relationship with McManus, and she wasn’t sure it was a step she wanted to take. But then she thought of what otherwise awaited her that evening in her flat – a quick glass of mediocre wine, a shallow bath (the hot water tank was minute), followed by a solitary microwaved supper, a little television, a couple of chapters of the disappointing thriller she was reading, and lights out. Not a very exciting prospect.
So she said, ‘OK. Thanks.’
Looking back, she supposed the whole affair wasn’t surprising. McManus was an attractive figure to a young woman. Good-looking, confident, mature – he could see Liz was pretty inexperienced and hadn’t been around much and he enjoyed showing her the town. He knew Liverpool like the back of his hand: from the industrial wastelands to the newly fashionable dockland; from the gentility of its grandest suburbs to clubs so rough that even the bouncers were scared of the clientele; from fancy French restaurants where the city’s famous footballers spent £1,500 on a bottle of wine they couldn’t pronounce to the bingo hall where he said his mother had been a habituée. Wherever they went the proprietor knew the Special Branch detective, and treated him with respect.
Liz was less certain what McManus saw in her. She sometimes wondered if in other circumstances he would have given her a second look. Observing the admiring glances he attracted from women of all sorts, from restaurant cloakroom girls to the chic owner of an upmarket boutique, she knew that he could have had his choice of women. But circumstances were what they were, and the simple fact remained that she had probably saved his life. If his interest in her arose out of gratitude, Liz couldn’t really object, since she was also grateful to him.
It was an intense affair, and for all the excitement of their social life, what really kept the two together was a mutual commitment to their work. Liz had already discovered a capacity for immersion in the job, and now that Avery had given her something substantial to do, she was interested and intent on doing it well. But she was nothing like McManus. As she quickly discovered, life for him was filtered through work. In the pubs and restaurants they visited, his conversations with the manager were information-gathering exercises. Even when they were most relaxed – a walk on the beach, a quiet meal in a country pub where no villain had ever set foot – McManus was alert, noticing anything out of the ordinary, any behaviour in the least bit strange. This was the first time Liz had experienced something that she later encountered often in her colleagues and indeed learned to practise herself, the acute awareness of one’s surroundings of the true intelligence officer.
But she soon discovered that McManus’s almost forensic attentiveness was focused not so much on intelligence gathering as on a righteous passion to sniff out wrongdoing and see it punished. He was a zero-tolerance police officer, openly disdainful of the way so many of the criminals he had hunted down wriggled free in their progress from arrest to the jury’s verdict. The only time Liz saw McManus lose his temper was when the Crown Prosecution Service refused to prosecute the leader of a drug ring, a man called Pears whom McManus had pursued for years, because in their view there was insufficient evidence to secure a conviction.
If Liz sometimes found McManus’s crusading spirit unsettling, she also admired it. Where some of his colleagues appeared quite happy to accept the odd freebie – drinks in a pub, a taxi ride home, free admission to a club – McManus wasn’t: when one evening the owner of a local restaurant brought them two brandies at the end of their meal and said they were ‘on the house’, McManus insisted they be added to the bill. But with Liz he was relaxed; she found him caring, loving and warm. To her surprise he seemed happy to be open about their relationship, and made no effort to disguise it from their colleagues. She was startled but flattered when quite early on he asked her to think about moving into his flat, and though she didn’t take that step she did find herself wondering how she could get her secondment to Liverpool extended.
They had been together for two months when things went suddenly wrong. They were in McManus’s flat, an elegant one-bedroom pad high enough up in a new block to give a spectacular view over the Mersey. McManus was in a jubilant mood, and over a glass of wine he explained that Pears, the drug dealer, had been arrested again and this time the Crown Prosecution Service were going to prosecute.