The Wild Heart by David Menon

understand. I quit!’ 
         Ian was sitting in the front passenger seat of Alice’s car. She’d met him in the supermarket car park and had parked nose in to the main Manchester to Liverpool road that ran in front of them. Granada studios with its massive red neon sign was to their left and the supermarket itself to their right. All kinds of people were milling about, going back and forth to their cars with bags full of groceries, unaware of what these two characters in the blue Golf were talking about.
         ‘ I want out’ Ian went on. ‘ I’ve finished. I’ve done enough’.
         ‘ What’s brought this on?’ Alice wanted to know. 
         ‘ Call it personal circumstances’ said Ian.
         When Alice first became Ian’s handler he’d been possessed by all the drive and hunger for revenge that she’d read about in his file. Over the years he’d built up a formidable reputation in the service. He could be trusted, relied upon. But recently she’d seen a change in him. The conversation she’d had with him after the Naughton mission hadn’t come as any great surprise.
         ‘ Lately I have noticed how you’ve been less than enthusiastic about the job in hand. Ian, you’re one of our best operatives and you have an obligation to the British state’.
         ‘ I have spent twenty years paying my obligations to the British state so don’t give me that bullshit!’ Ian retorted angrily. ‘ Look, if I’d have gone to prison instead of going down the road I did then I would’ve been out by now and we wouldn’t be having this conversation’.
         ‘ If you’d have gone to prison you’d have been dead a long time before now. They’d have got to you’.
         ‘ Okay, granted. But what kind of life is this?’
         ‘ Now I know what the conversation the other night at your place was all about’.
         ‘ I’ve reached the end of the road, Alice. Now you go back to London and tell them that I’ll be accepting no more missions from now on. It’s over’.
         Alice knew that her bosses would have other ideas about that.
     
        Derek liked to keep himself fit. He had the physique of a body builder and it helped to overcome the insecurities of his height at just over 5 foot 4. He’d long since lost all his hair and was never seen in anything other than his trademark sweatshirt, tracksuit trousers, trainers and a baseball cap. He was working out at the local gym and when he saw Freddie Burnside walking towards him he could tell from the look on his face that it was bad news.
         ‘ I fucking knew it!’ spat Derek through gritted teeth after receiving not just the bad news but the very bad news. ‘ That idiot was always going to screw things up. Have you got it covered?’ He shook his head ‘ Coshing a fucking copper? Jesus fucking Christ! This is all I need’.
         ‘ He panicked’ said Freddie ‘ He didn’t want the copper to be able to recognise him because he told him he was Ian Taylor but he didn’t finish him off. The copper is lying in a coma in hospital but there’s nothing to connect Kevin with the attack. He did it down the street, not in the yard itself. The copper was found by some guy going to his car’.
         Derek threw his towel down on the floor. How desperate had it all become? Some idiot they’d had to lean on had gone and fucked things up because he didn’t have the brains he’d been born with. 
         ‘ And if the copper comes through he could talk’. 
         ‘ Look, we’ve got to keep our cool. I’ve told Kevin to get himself over here. I’ll make sure he behaves until we figure out what to do’.
         ‘ I’m going over to Manchester, Freddie’ said Derek.
         ‘ Are you sure that’s wise, Derek?’
         ‘ Have you got a better idea?’
          ‘ Well if you think it’s worth the risk showing up over there now when Irvine isn’t ready for us