Shirley Dander

Who they are

One of the two horses in the intake that precedes Dead Lions — she and Marcus Longridge had known each other by sight at Regent’s Park, Ops and Comms. She came out of Comms and was sent down for flooring a colleague who had harassed her — twice — and for inviting the Service to sack her over it. The house reads her as difficult; the book is careful to show that the difficulty is a decision.

She also told the Service she was gay, and when Marcus Longridge asks whether it is true she declines to say. That is the shape of her: a woman who has learned that the only information she controls is what she withholds. The cost is that she withholds it from people who might help, and under pressure the cocaine habit comes back — a crash, a Hoxton pub, the certainty that someone is behind her.

What they want

Work worth doing, and to be underestimated while doing it — the one thing she asks of Marcus is that he not play her. Being handed the CCTV job matters to her more than she lets on.

Book 2 — Dead Lions

• C01 — Answers Marcus against her instincts, explains the canteen assault, and warns him not to play her.
• C02 — Lamb gives her the bald man: find the station he left the train at. Her first real errand here.
• C04 — Works the Moreton-in-Marsh rank and gets taxi driver Kenny Muldoon to admit he drove the man on to Upshott.
• C06 — Wakes at 9.42 from a crash, turns Marcus away, watches him make a call, then buys cocaine in Hoxton and feels followed.
• C07 — Finds the Gatwick footage that puts Mr. B on a Prague flight seven hours after Upshott.
• C14–C15 — Runs for The Needle, then climbs its stairwell past the thirty-second floor rather than leave Guy and Longridge to face Pashkin alone.
• C16 — Shares an office with Marcus, each convinced the other is Taverner’s informant.

Book 3 — Real Tigers

• C01 — Backhands Ho for calling Louisa ripe, then admits to Marcus that the cocaine is hers.
• C02–C04 — Sent to find River, finds nothing, and is talked into partnership over ice cream.
• C05–C08 — Recognises the blocked signal for a Service room, denies she is a junkie, then sees that Catherine does not look frightened.
• C09 — Refused by a database contact, she rings Molly Doran and finds the Grey Books facility west of Hayes in an HR newsletter; sacked beside Marcus.
• C10 — Sacked and in the car anyway; she admits the habit to Marcus and goes west with him.
• C13–C14 — Reads the klieg lights as a killing ground, then throws a man through a window and blinds a knifeman with half a CD.
• C15 — Finds a gun, frees Marcus from the van, and crosses the wasteground under fire to reach Louisa and River.

Underestimated by her own side throughout, she is the one who reads the ambush correctly; the book pays her in competence, not trust.

Book 4 — Spook Street

• C01 — Volunteers as the subject of the waterboarding experiment, lasts under seven seconds before giving the wrong safety word, and argues with Marcus Longridge that drowning a suspect is murder rather than housekeeping. Then files the staff into “issues” and “fuck-ups” and decides that River Cartwright is being replaced.
• C04 — Snatches Roderick Ho’s phone and reads Lamb’s text aloud, then fastens with Louisa Guy on the wording “Cartwright’s body” and argues it may mean the grandfather.
• C05 — Rings Molly Doran about the Cartwright personnel records after an expired password delays her, and converts the sound of Lamb laughing with Moira Tregorian on the stairs into a wager: three guesses, or Molly helps.
• C07 — Reports that David Cartwright made three or four official trips to France near Poitiers in the early nineties, recorded only in expenses claims and “stable” status updates on a retired agent codenamed Henry — and that he never travelled alone: his body-watcher was Bad Sam Chapman.
• C08 — Relays Ho’s tracking of Sam Chapman’s phone to Marcus through the backstreets, chivvies him by earpiece, and needles him about taking orders from her; she stays at the office while Louisa and Marcus go after Patrice.
• C09 — Teases Marcus about the wrecked cab and fills Louisa in on Catherine and the O.B.
• C11 — Sees the Pentonville Road phone video on a Google alert, then confronts JK Coe over what he told Lamb and gets a knife under her chin; he lowers it only when she says she is clear, and the trickle on her jaw turns out to be sweat.
• C13 — Arms herself with a corkscrew, is dragged out of the line of fire by Coe, offers to take Lamb’s empty revolver and shoot Patrice herself — and then goes to her own office and finds Marcus shot through the forehead, one bullet in his desk.
• C14 — Stands over the bound Patrice with his own gun, unable to stop seeing the mess behind Marcus’s head; Catherine Standish talks her out of it (“This isn’t an op. It would be an execution”), and she puts the weapon in Coe’s hand instead.
• C15 — Out dancing twenty-four hours later — not managing her anger but deliberately cultivating it — and named among the staff Lamb is left with.

She does the records work nobody else thinks to do, and is the one who finds Marcus; the book leaves the anger intact and pointed.

Book 5 — London Rules

• C01 — Sixty-two drug-free days and cocaine in her pocket, with the last anger-management session that evening in Shoreditch; sees a silver Honda mount the pavement and knocks Roderick Ho out of its path.
• C03 — Goes up to Lamb’s room instead of leaving for her session and asks for the gun Marcus kept; refused.
• C04 — On the first watch outside Ho’s house, alone, at a bus stop; breaks a window to get in, and is shot at as the intruder is driven away.
• C06 — Sent to Birmingham with Louisa; C07 has her waiting outside Jaffrey’s meeting with a monkey wrench for a weapon, and throwing it at the departing van.
• C10 — Opens Ho’s door with keys that were Marcus’s, and gets slashed by Kim Park in the front room.
• C11 — Ear taped after the slash, arguing for a television studio as the next target — the closest anyone gets to the truth.
• C14 — Takes Marcus’s loaded Glock from the shoebox, drives three and a half hours to Derbyshire with Coe, turns the key in the church door to keep the congregation in, and talks a young gunman into handing over his weapon.

Book 6 — Joe Country

• C01 — Gets shrugs out of JK Coe — he does not know where River is, has not spoken to the new man, does not know what he is in for — and gives up on him; back in her own room she goes through Operation Scofflaw, which she reads as an insult dressed up as work.
• C04–C05 — Traces the hire car to Southampton and a Canadian passport from the office where Marcus Longridge died; then offers the reading nobody else has, that Harkness came to the funeral for Oliver Nash.
• C08–C09 — Recruited over a cappuccino by River Cartwright and sceptical of the ditch theory on the sound ground that a phone cannot be placed to the nearest inch; she comes anyway, and spends the drive west finding the gun Lamb gave him.
• C10 — Digs Ho’s car out of the snow with a sheet of cardboard and then takes it out alone, which is the last time it is usefully drivable.
• C12 — Puts Ho’s car in a drift, takes the last of her speed while noting that Marcus would not have approved, and charges a barn two-handed with a plank into a woman with cattle and a kettle.
• C13 — Meets River on the road with a sausage sandwich she had bought for JK Coe and hands it over; River understands who it was for.
• C14 — Nine days on she sits behind a frozen screen and decides she had not really been ready to die; the book names Marcus as the colleague she thought she was avenging behind the barn.

Tells

The flat refusal to answer a direct question; the warning issued before the threat arrives (“don’t play me”). She watches a room before she enters it, and the prose gives her speed rather than grace — she roars out of car parks. Under strain the tells are physical: a nine-forty-two wake-up, legs like soup on a stairwell.

Open questions

Whether the claim about being gay is true, and whether it was ever only cover. How much of the Hoxton habit the book’s ending leaves running. What she did in Comms that made her worth keeping on rather than sacking.