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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