Lars Becker

Who they are

The second of Harkness’s three, and the one given the command: in C07 Harkness passes round Louisa Guy’s photograph and gives Becker the operation. He is the crew’s medic and its closest-in violence — he disables Louisa’s car, breaks a stranger’s nose for asking whether he is foreign, and kills Emma Flyte on the estuary track.

He speaks German with Anton Moser and is the more practical of the two. C13 shows him counting five villagers on the path, working out the order in which he would take them apart, and then doing none of it, standing among the oaks until they pass. C13 gives him three POV sections and the only interior the crew gets that is not a grievance: a job sold to him as in-and-out, fifty thousand pounds buying a silence, and farming country where gunshots would not trouble anyone.

He survives the book. C13 leaves him at the barn with Cyril’s body, burning the evidence behind him, and no later chapter accounts for him.

What they want

The fee, and to be paid it without a siege. He wants the job he was sold — in and out — and says as much when he tells Anton they have missed the moment. The book gives him no politics and no loyalty beyond the contract.

Book 6 — Joe Country

• C07 — Present at Harkness’s briefing in the barn and given the command of the operation.
• C09 — Sent to Paul’s Pantry while Anton takes the cottage; the two of them work out, in German, how to share the one car.
• C10 — Sent to the estuary boathouses while Harkness takes the coast road himself.
• C11 — Walks the estuary track past the car he disabled, still bruised from Louisa’s headbutt, then breaks a stranger’s nose, shows the woman how to hold his head, throws her phone into the woods and moves on.
• C12 — Emma Flyte’s last scene ends with her striking at her captor and a small sound no louder than a cough; C13 has Lars step out of the trees from the body, which is where the book places the shot.
• C13 — Lets five villagers walk past rather than take them apart; at the barn he finds Cyril dead and Coe stripped of phone and ID, and burns the barn and the crew’s car with both bodies inside.

Tells

The apology first, then the broken nose; he explains how to hold a man’s head while his nose bleeds. A contractor’s regret rather than a killer’s — “I think we’ve missed the moment.” He does the arithmetic of violence and then declines it when the odds are only five to one.

Open questions

What happens to him afterwards: C14’s tidy account of the Welsh deaths never mentions him, and the book does not say who pays the crew the fifty thousand pounds.