Diana Taverner

Who they are

Second Desk at Regent’s Park, running operations while Ingrid Tearney is abroad. She is Slow Horses’s antagonist not because she is evil but because she is ambitious in an institution that rewards the appearance of control: when her staged kidnapping becomes a real murder, her first instinct is the timeline, not the boy.

What they want

To be First Desk, and to get there without a scandal attached to her name. Her problem is that she has created exactly such a scandal and cannot decide whether to solve it or bury it.

Book 1 — Slow Horses

• C04 — Plans the response to the hostage video; hears from Nick Duffy that Moody claims Lamb is running an op, dismisses it, and locks away the memory stick James Webb delivered.
• C06 — Briefs the Limitations committee on Hassan Ahmed; is needled by Roger Barrowby; then recruits Moody off the books with an incoming-only phone.
• C09 — By the canal, admits to Lamb that Moody was her man and that the boy’s uncle is an ISI general; trades terms — Moody disappears, Sid is a street crime, Lamb’s people are fireproof, she owes him.
• C11 — Identifies the decapitated body as her own agent Alan Black, tells Tearney that Lamb ran him and has gone rogue, and wins authority to arrest Lamb.
• C12 — Breaks Struan Loy in a basement interview room and turns him.
• C16 — Offers Lamb a clean exit if he co-signs Loy and White’s statements, threatens to reopen Catherine’s file, and loses control of the building when Lamb claims a bomb.

Book 2 — Dead Lions

• C05 — Meets Jackson Lamb on the canal bench near the Angel, learns of the unsent text, and is talked into a pre-used identity and an operating fund for a Cotswolds operation.
• C06 — Summons James Webb, gets the Pashkin secondment out of him and two further admissions, and lets the approach stand; then looks the oligarch up online rather than request a file.
• C14 — With Tearney abroad and Roger Barrowby dithering, counts him down four seconds until he authorises a response to half a message from a slow horse.
• C15 — Told by Lamb that the whole trail was a flare path, and still pushing Barrowby into emptying the City.
• C16 — Ends the day intact: Barrowby takes the blame and resigns, and the informant she claimed inside Slough House turns out to be a fiction she invented to unsettle Lamb.

The one operator who spends nothing. A summit she let run turned into an officer shot and a gangster dead on a roof, and the blame landed on the chair of Limitations. Lamb’s last thought about her is retribution, which is not a cost yet.

Book 3 — Real Tigers

• C03 — Denied a deputy because she has filed too well, then hears Tearney’s warning about Judd and reads it as a recruitment.
• C04 — Hears River out on the staircase about Webb and promises to look into the machines, courtesy that lets him double back.
• C05 — Tells Lamb that River goes to the Met over a Scott-level document, refusing to say what he wanted.
• C07 — Warns Lamb that Judd will replace Second Desk with appointees, and that the Slough House brief is a closing order.
• C09 — On a Paddington bench owns the tiger team, denies knowing Sean Donovan, and returns Judd’s grope.
• C10–C13 — Answers Tearney vaguely about the invoices and Donovan, then drinks alone, wagering her career on the file.
• C14 — Had a drink spiked and a car’s steering tampered with — Donovan’s drink, not Dunn’s — let Donovan carry the blame, then sold him Tearney as the culprit.
• C16 — Sets out Project Waterproof, expects First Desk, and is handed a folder containing an Angling Times.

She expects Tearney’s chair, having spent six years and several lives on the story that got her there: the quietest victory in the series, and the only one conducted by omission.

Book 4 — Spook Street

• C03 — Takes Flyte’s call in the corridor during the COBRA pre-meetings, tells her to put the local police on the search for David Cartwright while letting them believe the shooting is connected to Westacres, then returns to criticise Claude Whelan’s briefing and watch him sign three copies of papers he has not read.
• C04 — Meets Flyte by the Globe and orders the analyst Giti Rahman collected and isolated, producing a warrant signed by Whelan, taking it back, and setting a reporting chain in which Flyte answers to her alone.
• C05 — Walks Whelan off Oxford Circus, pays cash for a bus to leave no paper trail, and tells him that Robert Winters was a cold body — a Service identity built through official channels over decades and kept current until needed — and that three are unaccounted for, the warrant he signed before COBRA making him complicit.
• C07 — At the Park renames the cold bodies “product” so the term cannot give them away (“We are spies, remember?”), insists the Service had no involvement in Westacres beyond its product being misappropriated, then names Paul Wayne and Adam Lockhead and has them searched at low priority.
• C10 — Brings Whelan the news that Adam Lockhead’s passport has lit up on the Eurostar and that she has sent Flyte to meet the train with no official chain of custody.
• C12 — Rings Flyte to order her back to sit with Rahman, then works Whelan round to a shoot-to-kill order against Patrice and River — “there’s no point shooting to wound” — and leaves him reaching for the phone to the PM.
• C15 — Offstage: Whelan reports that she wanted Harkness shot rather than taken, and she ends the book having to countersign the ten-year active-agent payment Lamb has forced out of him.

She wins the arguments she is in and still ends the book signing off a payment extracted from her own First Desk.

Book 5 — London Rules

• C02 — Briefs Whelan on fourteen dead in the second bombing, no useful CCTV, one pipe bomb and no clear pattern; discusses Gimball and Jaffrey.
• C05 — Arrives at Slough House in the rain, confronts Lamb about the unreported attack on Ho, tells him the bullets match Abbotsfield, locks the office down and takes Ho to the Park.
• C10 — Joins Dodie Gimball’s car and tells her to publish her story on Jaffrey and leave the Service out of it.
• C11 — Decides the crew must die and the document will be denied; tells Whelan the operation was British in design and North Korean in execution.
• C12 — Confronts Emma Flyte over the abandoned lockdown and the unauthorised interrogation, and settles with her on the Abbey as the target.
• C13 — Works the hub through the memorial service, takes Josie’s sit-rep, and notes Kim Park held downstairs without charge.
• C14 — Visits Lamb to run through his staff’s offences, is shown the declassified Watering Hole Paper, and leaves with First Desk.

Book 6 — Joe Country

• C01 — First Desk at last, and one of her first acts is to reopen Emma Flyte’s appraisal and offer her Slough House as a sideways move; Flyte refuses with an obscenity and walks out, which leaves the Head Dog outside the Service and outside Taverner’s control.
• C03 — At St Leonard’s for David Cartwright’s funeral, watched from a parked car by Frank Harkness, who is there collecting faces; when River vaults the grave she asks Lamb why she senses his hand in it.
• C05 — Asks Richard Pynne why she was not told Harkness was in-country, gives Oliver Nash a paragraph of history and lets him believe he is in charge of it, and learns the PM has rejected her working paper.
• C07 — Lunches with Peter Judd off the books with her phone in pieces, and hears the shape of it: a royal, a boy who asked for fifty thousand pounds, and a dead Five officer called Harper. She leaves without agreeing to talk again.
• C08 — Takes Nash onto the Park roof and asks him to trigger the Fugue Protocol, answers no to both qualifying questions and admits her concern is reputational; he refuses, and says he will minute the conversation.
• C10 — Reviews the Fugue application she made knowing it would be refused, so that the refusal stands minuted, and has a Pembrokeshire go-dark notice from a civilian phone filed under forget; then goes back round the Hub braced for collateral damage.
• C14 — Oversight reads the Fugue application as bad faith; Judd offers a Service funded by private partners with himself as broker, and she calls it a coup, refuses it, and walks back to the Park more slowly than usual.

Tells

Smoking in the one CCTV blind spot in London. Committee language, “the optics”, the constant recalculation behind the eyes. She never raises her voice and never forgives.

Open questions

What her contingency call at the end of C09 set in motion. Whether the Fiasco file is enough to hold her, or only enough to make her careful.