Kim Park

Who they are

Roderick Ho’s girlfriend, and the reason someone keeps trying to kill him. She is introduced as a woman at a club in Stockwell who leaves in a taxi with Ho and tells the driver to take her on alone (C04) — and then, from the taxi, telephones someone to say that Ho is home and alone, and asks that it be made quick because he is harmless.

That call is the book’s first real fact about her: she is not a girlfriend, she is a job. C08 has Emma Flyte establish that Ho gave her access to his work — the Watering Hole Paper among it — and that she is Korean rather than Chinese; C09 completes it, and has Ho’s interrogators report she is of North Korean descent. The cell were students planted years earlier, and Kim was the way in.

She is also the one who does not die. C08’s account, from Danny, is that Shin killed her; C09 finds her hiding in a wardrobe in Ho’s house with a straightened wire hanger, and she fights her way out past three slow horses before a car door knocks her down in the street. C10 has her talking to Flyte; C12 has her held at Regent’s Park without charge.

What they want

The book gives her one want and lets it stand: to live. Her POV section in C09 is the only time the reader is inside her, and it is all fear, geography and the coat hanger. Whatever she was sent to do, she does not do the last part of it — Shin let her live (C10), and the reader is never told whether that was mercy, failure or a message.

Book 5 — London Rules

C01 — Offstage: her existence is what makes the attempt on Ho a puzzle rather than a mugging.
C04 — Leaves the club with Ho, then calls the hit in from the taxi and asks that it be quick.
C05 — Named as the likely honeytrap once the Abbotsfield bullets turn up in Ho’s house.
C06 — Named as the conduit: the cell’s route to the document Ho was holding.
C08 — Reported dead by Danny, and established as Korean, and as the person Ho let into his work.
C10 — Hiding in Ho’s wardrobe; fights her way out with a wire hanger, is knocked down in the street, and is brought to Slough House.
C11 — Talks to Flyte: the crew are students planted years earlier, and Shin let her live.
C13 — Held at the Park, without charge, while the day runs out.

Book 6 — Joe Country

C01 — Named only as the woman Ho believed was his girlfriend and now calls history; “a bad year over Kim” is the whole of her presence, and it is offered as the reason he is back at his post.
C06 — Named again in passing, as Roddy’s ex-girlfriend who liked being called babes — the word he then uses on Emma Flyte at his door.

Tells

The telephone call in the taxi, made in front of the reader before there is any reason to doubt her. The hanger. And a name that is not a name — C09 has Whelan told that “Kim Park, Roderick Ho’s girlfriend, or passing as”.

Open questions

What she was asked to get, and how much of what she told Flyte is true. Why Shin let her live when he had killed Joon for less. And whether the Service ever charges her, which C12 leaves open.

Roderick Ho · Shin · The SSD · The Watering Hole Paper · Emma Flyte