Close Call

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.

‘What changed?’ asked Liz.

‘New evidence,’ said McManus.

‘Really, what sort of evidence?’ She was curious to know, since the CPS had previously complained that the avail­able evidence was too circumstantial.

‘A witness has come forward. He’s prepared to say he saw Pears make a big sale.’

‘That’s excellent,’ said Liz. ‘Why did he come forward now? It must be a bit risky for him. Are you going to have to protect him?’

McManus shrugged. ‘Maybe it was my appeal to his better nature – not that this particular little runt has one.’ He paused and looked at Liz with a grin. ‘Maybe it had something to do with letting him off another charge if he came good in this case.’

‘A deal, in other words,’ said Liz, starting to understand.

‘If you want to call it that.’

‘What else should I call it? The little runt, as you call him, has decided he’s seen something because that way he gets off.’

‘It may be a rough kind of justice, but believe me it’s still justice. He would have seen Pears do other deals plenty of times.’

‘But not this one?’

Again McManus shrugged, this time in acknowledgement. His jubilation was gone. He said defensively, ‘What the hell. I didn’t say it was ideal. But this way we’ll get a result.’

Liz said, ‘It’s wrong. You know that.’

He looked at her and shook his head. ‘Forget about it. More wine?’

‘No, thanks. You haven’t answered my question.’

‘I didn’t hear any question.’ He’d got up and was pouring himself a glass of Chianti.

Liz said, ‘You know what I mean. I know what you’ve done, and it’s wrong.’

‘Says who?’ His voice was sharp now. ‘Says Liz Carlyle, twenty-something trainee spook from London. The same Liz Carlyle who’s never walked a beat, never made an arrest, never looked down the barrel of a gun held by some scumbag who’d as soon pull the trigger as sneeze. A Liz Carlyle who might be just a little out of her depth here.’

He had never spoken like this to her before. She said as calmly as she could, ‘It’s not right, Jimmy. Not because little Liz Carlyle says so. It’s not right because it just isn’t. You can’t go round making up evidence just because you’re convinced someone is guilty. You can’t be judge and jury; that’s not your job.’

‘Nice speech, Liz, but if we can’t rely on the legal system, what else can we do? If I have to bend the rules to get this bastard, I will. It’s the results that matter. Getting Pears off the streets and locked up where he belongs.’

‘It’s not some minor rules you’re bending, it’s the law. Here you are saying Pears can’t stand above the law, but then where are you standing?’

McManus made a show of looking at his watch. ‘Time’s up,’ he announced. ‘Our booking’s ten minutes from now. You better get your coat.’

The flippancy in this dismissal enraged Liz. ‘I’ll get my coat,’ she snapped. ‘And see myself out.’

They didn’t speak for three days, each locked into their conviction that they were right. Finally Liz decided it was ridiculous to behave this way – she was never going to agree with what he’d done, and her whole view of the man had changed. But even if they weren’t going to be lovers any more, it seemed ridiculous not to be on speaking terms, so towards the end of the day, when McManus came into the office and sat down at his desk, she went over.

‘Fancy a drink?’ she said lightly. Purvis at the desk next to them was pretending not to listen.

‘Got a lot on,’ McManus said tersely, without lifting his head from the papers he was reading.

‘OK,’ said Liz. The rebuff couldn’t have been clearer.

She gave it a week, then tried again, and received the same short shrift. After that, they ignored each other, which made for a certain tension in the office, though nothing like it had been when she first arrived. She went back to spending the evenings boringly alone, now looking forward to the end of her Liverpool posting. She missed McManus – or she missed the man she had thought he was, though it gave her a sliver of comfort to know that that man did not exist.

When McManus left Liverpool on promotion to Greater Manchester, she barely noticed, so accustomed by then was she to not having him in her life. She was not invited to his leaving do, and he did not even bother to say goodbye. So she could only imagine his reaction when the drug dealer Pears was convicted and given eight years.

Then one morning she heard Purvis complaining that he’d paid more than he could afford for a second-hand Audi he’d bought from McManus when he’d left for Manchester. Liz’s car was once again in the garage and suddenly she found herself offering to buy the Audi off Purvis for the same price he’d paid McManus. Purvis accepted with alacrity. Since she was never going to see or hear from McManus again, Liz reckoned this would be the legacy of their affair.