1
The walls of his cage glow gently with the light of the setting sun. He floats in the water, weightless, mind calm. It has been many days now since last she came to visit him. Too many days, perhaps. He remembers how weak she was, how frail, that last time. Has something happened to her?
He reaches out his senses, feels for the gentle tug of the bond between them. He cannot recall a time when that link wasn’t there. Like a noose around his neck, or a sword hanging above him on a single, fragile thread, the oath he swore holds him here. Makes it so he cannot disobey her command.
But there has been no command, and now that voice in his head is still.
She is dead, he can feel it.
She is dead, and the bond has not been tied to another.
She is dead, and he is free.
Not quite. For still the bond is there, fragile as a spiderweb but too strong for even his prodigious strength to break. They thought they were so clever, caging him like this. But it was never the bars that held him in place, not the steel doors that kept them safe from his vengeance. It was her all along, the ties of blood, the curse, the oath sworn long ago. Without her control, his mind is clear. And in that moment, he knows how to be truly free, how to break the curse once and for all. If he can only find the last remaining drops of her blood, extinguish them from this realm.
And so he drifts, dialling out the maelstrom, searching for that unique taste that is of her line. Tune out the gossip of whales and the chatter of seals, the endless background hum of diesel engines chugging freight around the globe, the bedrock noise of the wind turbines. Ignore the taste of chemicals dumped, of ships sunken and rotting, of men, so many men, polluting it all. The sea knows, and the sea will tell him if he only has the patience to listen.
There, he can sense it. So faint as to be almost nothing, but the sea brings him the taste and the sea never lies. The last few vestiges of the link remain, those points that anchor him to the land more firmly than any chain. But they do not command him like she did, do not understand what they have. So he will take it back from them, and then he will truly be free.
With barely a thought, he sinks below the surface, down to the bottom where the sea comes in. They built this cage with thick iron bars, as if such a thing could hold the likes of him. How foolish they were in their confidence.
2
At least the coffee was good, and someone had splashed out on half-decent biscuits.
Detective Chief Inspector Tony McLean took a bite of chocolate hobnob, swallowed it down with the last dregs of his mug and leaned back in his chair. He had spent a long career avoiding meetings like the one in which he now found himself. As it slid seamlessly into its second hour, he was reminded once more why he went to all that effort.
Almost everyone around the wide conference table was in uniform, and none of them below the rank of Chief Inspector. A few civilians huddled at one end of the table, too senior to be admin, so most likely their presence was political. The only other plain clothes officer was Detective Superintendent Kirsty Ritchie, and McLean was struck by how much she had changed since she had first transferred down from Aberdeen. What was that, ten years ago now? Fifteen? It could even have been more. She’d been a sergeant then, his junior. He didn’t feel any envy at her having leapfrogged him up the promotion ladder. Most of her time was taken up with meetings like this one now, or driving between police headquarters on either side of the country for yet more meetings.
‘Which brings us on to the next item on the agenda. Operation Lammergeier. I believe that’s your one, Detective Superintendent?’
The question, or more likely the rather unwieldy operation name someone had come up with, punctured McLean’s musings. He turned his attention to the deputy chief constable as beside him Ritchie shuffled her papers and reached for the remote control that would give her power over the projector. A single click cleared away the dry table of budget projections that had been there, replacing it with an even less welcome image, if the collected flinch of the entire strategy group was any indication. Only McLean showed no outward sign of shock, having seen the photograph and too many like it already. A young man, cadaverously thin, posed to show the injuries that had been inflicted on him in a brutal attack. That the photograph had been taken two weeks after the event, once the hospital had stitched him up and splinted his broken bones, only made it worse.
‘Apologies for dropping you all in at the deep end,’ Ritchie said, without a hint of remorse in her tone. ‘But I think it important you all see what it is we’re dealing with here.’
She clicked the remote and the image changed. Another young man, another series of horrific injuries.
‘I have other photographs, all much the same. These young men were all beaten almost to death and dumped. Most people probably wouldn’t think much more about it than that. It’s horrible, devastating for the people involved, but life’s hard. There is, however, a little more to it.’
Ritchie clicked again, and this time the image was of a woman, probably in her late twenties or early thirties, although it was hard to tell. Like the two young men before her, she lay in a hospital bed. Unlike them, she was either unconscious or simply unable to see through the enormous swollen bruising about both eyes. Her arms were in casts, lying on top of the bed covers, and a livid gash in one cheek was held together with neatly sewn stitches that would nevertheless leave her with horrific scarring.
‘This is Charlene McKenzie. Or to give her the respect she deserves, Police Constable Charlene McKenzie. One of our best undercover operatives and currently in an induced coma at the Royal Infirmary. It’s still touch and go whether she’ll recover at all, and it’s very likely she’ll have to be pensioned off.’
‘Who did this?’
McLean leaned forward to see who had asked the question. A stern-faced woman in the uniform of a chief superintendent, he was fairly sure her name was Mathieson.
‘As yet, that’s unknown.’ Ritchie clicked back to the first of the two men. ‘This man is Alan Renton, the other one, Gavin Pierson. Both of them are small time drug dealers, runners for their local gangs. Renton in Dundee, Pierson in Aberdeen. They’re also both informants we’d asked to find out anything they could about this man.’
Another click of the button and this time the image was a little less harrowing. Taken with a long lens, it showed a head shot of a middle-aged man, short hair beginning to grey around the temples but otherwise not particularly noteworthy.
‘And he is?’ the stern-faced woman asked. Definitely Mathieson, McLean was sure of it now. Audrey Mathieson. A few years younger than him. Worked her way up through Traffic to senior management.
‘His name is Malachi Quinn. He owns an ocean-going trawler out of Lochinver, has interests in half a dozen other boats. He also runs a fish distribution company. Our friends at the NCA think it’s all a front for trafficking drugs and people in through smaller ports and private moorings along the west coast. Only, whenever we think we’ve got a lead on him, he’s somehow two steps ahead of us.’
Ritchie clicked back to the image of PC McKenzie in her hospital bed.
‘We have no idea how McKenzie’s cover was blown. She’s experienced, very good at her job, and the identity she was using should have been bulletproof. And yet somehow Quinn got to her before she’d even started.’
‘Everyone makes mistakes sometimes.’ This, from one of the civilians seated beside the deputy chief constable, was greeted with the silence it deserved.
‘Not Charlene. And not so early into the assignment. Not like she just got unlucky, either. They knew exactly who she was and what she was doing.’
‘How can you know that?’ the DCC asked.
‘Because after they’d beaten her unconscious and broken her arms and legs, they dumped her right outside the police station where she first worked as a beat officer.’
Ritchie let the silence that followed the revelation run for what felt like a full minute, but was probably only a few seconds.
‘We considered the possibility that there’s a leak in the operation, before anyone suggests it. That might account for the informants, but not Charlene. The number of people who knew of her involvement was strictly limited and I vetted all of them myself.’
‘What is it that you’re saying then, detective superintendent?’ the DCC asked.
Ritchie let out a long sigh. ‘That Operation Lammergeier is a bust, sir. I know we’ve had a great deal invested in it, but we need to scrap the whole thing and come at it from a different angle.’
***
‘You think they’ll go for it? Write this down as a loss and let us start the investigation all over again?’
McLean hadn’t meant to sound quite so cynical, but in his defence he’d sat through almost two hours of strategy meeting that could have been an email, or better yet not bothered him at all. At least he and Ritchie had managed to leave early, having left the collected senior uniforms to discuss vitally important managerial things in the conference room on the ground floor. Now the two of them sat in the detective superintendent’s office three floors up, one door down from McLean’s own. They both had fresh coffees, but no biscuits this time.
‘Let’s hope so,’ Ritchie said. ‘I wanted to get Quinn before, but it’s personal now.’
‘Aye, I get that. Still not sure why you had to drag me into it, mind.’
‘Sorry about that, but I doubt they’d have even heard what I was saying if you’d not been sat beside me glowering at them all.’
‘My reputation, eh?’
Ritchie shrugged. ‘Believe it or not, they’re all a little scared of you. Even the DCC. That or a little jealous. You have a knack for ignoring the politics and yet somehow getting away with it.’
‘That was never the game I signed up to play though, Kirsty. You know as well as anyone I’m not interested in management. I’m a detective, that’s what I do.’ McLean glanced at his watch. ‘It’s what I should really be doing now.’
‘Busy in MIT is it?’ Ritchie’s voice held just a hint of sarcasm. It was always busy, winding up previous investigations, preparing for court appearances, sorting out the paperwork. But at that precise point in time they weren’t engaged in any major investigations. Which was nice.
‘You know as well as I do, a policeman’s lot is never an easy one. Still, Charlene McKenzie. What’s the prognosis?’
‘Not good.’ Ritchie’s shoulders slumped as if the weight of the world had been suddenly dumped on them. ‘Doctors are going to bring her out of the induced coma today, but her injuries are horrific. It’s like I told the high heidyins downstairs, I doubt she’ll work again. And the knocks she took to the head, who knows what she’ll remember?’
‘Not much chance of finding out who did it then.’
‘Oh, I think we know, Tony. Malachi Quinn might not have wielded the club himself, but this has got his marker all over it.’
‘How do you know, though, Kirsty? I’ve read the reports on this operation and there’s nothing about the guy but rumour and conjecture. Everything’s circumstantial and whenever you try to gather evidence things like this happen.’
The shake of the detective superintendent’s head was barely perceptible, but it was there. She reached for her coffee mug, didn’t take a drink from it. ‘That’s what makes me certain it’s him, don’t you see? Every time we get close, something like this happens. I just wish I knew how he’s getting his intel. Charlene’s cover was impeccable. No way it could have been blown so quickly.’
‘You think it’s coming from us, or the NCA?’
‘I don’t think anyone on either team is bent, if that’s what you’re asking. Nobody’s being leaned on either – I’ve run enough of these operations to spot that kind of thing. I’d say it was possibly an IT hack or something, but the systems we’ve been using are the best. Compartmentalised so you can’t get access to everything. Strictly need-to-know, and very few people needed to know Charlene was going deep undercover.’
‘Want us to look into it?’ McLean asked. ‘Discreetly, of course. Wouldn’t want to tread on Professional Standards’ toes. I guess they’ll be all over this.’
For a moment he thought the detective superintendent would say no. He could understand why, although if she was going to play by the rules on this then why tell him about the operation in the first place?
‘You can do discreetly?’ she asked. ‘I mean, mostly you make a habit of treading on everyone’s toes, Tony. Particularly Jen Williams over at Professional Standards.’
‘I have nothing but respect for DCI Williams, Kirsty. You know that.’ McLean picked up his mug, decided he really didn’t need any more coffee right now and put it back down again. ‘Let me know when Charlene’s awake. I’ve worked with her before, back when I was in Vice. Shouldn’t raise any suspicions if I check in on an old colleague injured in the line of duty.’
Copyright James Oswald 2026. All rights reserved.