'He was nine years old and he had a bullet wound in his arm. It was three o'clock in the morning and he was about to sit alone with the bodies of three men, any one of whom, when alive, would have killed him without a second thought. He had more stamina, more courage, than any man she had ever worked with . . .'
Orla McLeod knows too much about violence for her own good. She knows about pain and how to inflict it, she knows about guilt and she knows about survival. And because she was barely a teenager when she learnt all this, she knows what these things can do to a child.
So when she and a nine-year-old boy are the only ones left alive in a freezing Glasgow tenement after a Special Branch undercover operation she was spearheading has gone disastrously wrong, there's no way Orla McLeod's going to let anyone else take care of Jamie Buchanan. Not when Jamie's the sole witness to Tord Svensen committing an act of savagery of the kind that's rapidly turning him into one of the most feared criminals in Europe. Especially since Svensen knows a lot about survival too.
