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few weeks working on a case together back in the autumn, but I still hardly knew him.
    â€˜I think maybe it was different in Manchester.’
    He sounded not resentful exactly but I did have the feeling that my youthful frivolities – mostly modest enough on the whole – were being put firmly in their place.
    â€˜You think it happened because she plunged in too rapidly?’
    â€˜Look, Nell, by your account, up to about six or seven months ago she was the model daughter, with nothing in her head except ponies and dinghies.’
    â€˜That’s what her mother thought. There must be more to any nineteen-year-old girl than that.’
    â€˜Still, she was an ordinary girl with a conventional upbringing.’
    â€˜Certainly conventional. Ordinary? Is anybody?’
    â€˜Let’s say, nothing remarkable about her that we know of.’
    â€˜No.’ Nothing remarkable. Except that she’d put a noose round her neck, lashed her feet to a plank and waited for the tide to go out. Perhaps.
    â€˜Yet within those six or seven months she’s stopped writing to her parents, taken an interest in radical politics and moved in with a household of drug-takers and anarchists.’
    â€˜Are you implying I should have looked after her better?’
    â€˜You know I’m not. Still…’
    He left it. We came to Albert Bridge, strolled to the middle of it, watched a steamer full of trippers going underneath, strolled back again. The man in the yellowish boater strolled too, on the opposite side of the bridge. I didn’t draw Bill’s attention to him. After all, I might have been wrong.

Chapter Six
    W E WENT TO BORIS GODUNOV AFTER ALL, BUT if you want a detailed critique of Chaliapin’s performance you’ll have to find somebody who stayed awake. From the clamour of cheers and bravos that jerked my head up from Bill’s shoulder, I assume it was up to standard. Going home afterwards in a cab, I couldn’t stop apologising.
    â€˜Honestly, I’ve never done that before.’
    â€˜Then I’m sorry my company is so uniquely unstimulating.’
    â€˜Oh God, I didn’t mean that, you know I didn’t. Only…’
    â€˜It has been quite a day. Or is that normal with you?’
    At least he didn’t seem offended. We were close together on the hansom seat and I’d have liked to rest my head on his shoulder again, but didn’t have the excuse of going to sleep. In the traffic, we were stopping and swerving too much to make it plausible.
    â€˜I assume it didn’t end happily.’
    â€˜Correct. Macbeth without the jokes.’
    He saw me to my front door, I said thank you for everything, he said to let him know if he could help. Then he took the cab on to the friends he was staying with in Camden. He had to get the train back to Manchester in the morning. That was it.
    *   *   *
    For the next ten days or so I tried to put it all out of my mind and just get on with work, both the kind that got me into trouble and the other kind that paid the rent. The first category was getting grimmer all the time. It wasn’t just a case of demonstrating and window-smashing. These went on but they were almost echoes from an age of innocence compared to what was happening now. This summer, the conflict between ourselves and the authorities was so bitter and violent that neither side could see a way out of it short of a catastrophe worse than anything that had happened before. We weren’t just a nuisance to be shrugged off: we were enemies of the state. The police searched homes, arrested some of our people on suspicion of bomb-making, stayed in occupation of our headquarters and seized our incoming mail. We moved to our Westminster offices in Tothill Street, almost within the shadow of the Houses of Parliament, then they raided us there as well.
    One of the immediate consequences for me was that plain clothes observation of my movements