Close Call (5 page)

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.

Chapter 7

The sky was black over the mountains as Miles drove his SUV along the sandy road into the countryside. The Trade Minister, Baakrime, had said that he would have something to tell Miles in a week, and the previous day an invitation had arrived at the US Embassy inviting him to lunch at the Minister’s farm in the hills outside Sana’a.

Miles’s colleagues in Langley were waiting impatiently for the payback on the cash that Baakrime had been given, information they were sure the Minister was holding about the sources of arms that were getting into the hands of jihadis through Yemen.

But Miles was uncomfortable, nervous about this ­journey away from comparative safety in the bustle of the town. Minister Baakrime had fallen for his recruitment pitch suspiciously quickly, taking the envelope of cash and promising information. But had he really agreed, or was this invitation a trap either to kill Miles or expose him as a foreign spy? He had consulted Langley overnight but they were keen to get the information and prepared to take a risk, so he was instructed to go to the meeting – and wear a tracking device that would be monitored by a drone far overhead. It wouldn’t help if he was killed but might if he was kidnapped – small consolation.

Miles glanced uneasily at the darkening sky. The climate in Yemen, normally so hot and dry, could produce sudden short but heavy cloudbursts, and it looked as if that was exactly what was on the way.

Seconds later it arrived. Rain beat thunderously on the top of the car; the wipers sweeping at top speed from side to side of the windscreen had no effect and the glass ran with a stream of water thick with sand raised by the sudden wind and the force of the rain. Miles could see nothing. The fields of arable crops and fruit orchards that bordered the road disappeared from sight and he stopped the car where he was, in the middle of the single-track road, hoping no vehicle was coming the other way. If there was, he wouldn’t see it and it wouldn’t see him until it was upon him.

He sat sweating with heat and tension until suddenly the rain stopped, the wipers cleared away the sand and he could see the road again. It was more of a small river now and his wheels threw up a fountain of water on each side of the car as he drove slowly on. As the sun came out again, he saw in the distance the red walls of what he took to be his objective, the Minister’s farm.

The carved wooden gates of the compound were open as Miles drove up. A young man in a white robe and a ­Western-style sports jacket saluted and waved him in through the gates, then walked across to open the car door as Miles parked against the wall beside a wet and muddy silver Mercedes with a two-digit licence plate – 12.

‘Salaam aleikum. Come this way, sir.’

Miles followed the young man into a lofty hall. Sunlight glanced though small windows set high up in the walls, but below the room was in shade and at first Miles, coming in from the bright sunlight, could see little. As his eyes got used to the dim light he saw the rough stone walls, the red-tiled floor covered with rugs in subdued colours, and around the room ottomans and chairs covered with cushions and throws of bright silks. This was a very luxurious farmhouse.

‘Sit down, sir. The Minister will be here shortly,’ said the young man in unaccented English. He clicked his fingers and a servant appeared with a tray of glasses of fruit juice.

Miles sat on the edge of an ottoman, sipping a glass of pomegranate juice. His sense of unease grew as he waited, wondering what would happen next.

‘My friend.’ A loud voice echoed across the hall as Baakrime in a long white robe strode towards Miles, his hand held out. ‘It is delightful to see you here. I must apologise for our weather. These rain storms blow up at this time of the year, but they are soon over. Unlike your hurricanes, they do little damage.’ He pumped Miles’s hand enthusiastically, setting up a sharp twingeing pain in his shoulder.

‘I thought it best to meet here. It is safe and away from prying eyes. Everyone here is family or old servants of my family. The road you came along is watched by my people and the young man who met you is one of my sons. He is my secretary. He was at school in England and at Cambridge University. Do you know England?’

‘Yes,’ said Miles. ‘I have worked in London.’

‘London. I love that city.’  The Minister rubbed his hands together. ‘We go there every year. My wife enjoys the shopping. Oxford Street, Harrods. I come back a poor man.’ He smiled and Miles smiled back. Baakrime’s poverty was not to be taken seriously.

‘But let us eat while we talk,’ and the clapping of his hands produced two servants with trays of little dishes and jugs of more fruit juice. One tray was placed on a brass-topped table beside Miles and the other beside Baakrime. Glasses were filled and the servants withdrew.