Open questions

Question

What does Dead Lions deliberately leave unresolved, and which gaps are accidents?

Evidence

• C13, Ho: seventeen families arrived in Upshott between March and June 1991, none of them connected to the airbase, and none of their early records survive the check.
• C15, Katinsky: each cicada “holds plastic explosive and has been told where to plant it”; he dials the numbers and nobody answers.
• C15, Kyril: Min Harper was killed because he had seen Pashkin when Pashkin was supposed to be in Moscow.
• C12, Lamb and Molly Doran: Katinsky was never a minnow, and this is a new operation rather than the old plan.
• C16: Louisa Guy keeps the diamond; Shirley and Marcus each believe the other is Taverner’s informant; River wonders whether his grandfather framed ZT/53235 in 1951.

Reading

The book’s open questions divide cleanly into three kinds.

Deliberate, and pointed at the next book.

1. What did the cicadas actually receive? Katinsky says each sleeper holds plastic explosive and knows where to plant it, and then the call goes unanswered. That makes seventeen armed people who never got their instruction — a residue the series can return to, and a much more disturbing outcome than a successful bombing would have been.
2. Who told Pashkin that Min had seen him? Kyril gives the motive but not the channel. Lamb’s house has a leak, Taverner claims a source inside it (a claim C16 says she invented), and the book leaves both explanations standing at once.
3. What does Louisa do with the diamond? It is an escape route she has not decided to use, and the book ends with her sobbing over an empty desk and an empty flat.

Deliberate, and thematic rather than plot.

4. Did David Cartwright build ZT/53235? River’s suspicion is never confirmed or denied. The O.B. recites the town’s number digit-perfect while pretending to misremember it, and the book’s last word on the subject is that the Service planted the evidence of a traitor there.
5. Who invented Popov? The Service planted evidence of a traitor in ZT/53235 to justify burning the town; Katinsky built the legend’s biography out of his own past there; and the Service spent decades chasing the result. The book never settles whether the legend was a Service fabrication that Katinsky colonised or a Katinsky fabrication the Service swallowed — both accounts are in the text.

Accidental or under-determined.

6. Rebecca Mitchell’s protectors. Her vetting was signed off after going back only ten years, under Taverner’s pressure, and Duffy is made to pay for it. Who wanted it signed is not stated.
7. The season. A March prologue and “the warmest day of the year” in C14 are six weeks apart; the text does not date the summit.

Confidence

High that 1–5 are deliberate: each is set up in a scene that explicitly declines to close it. Medium on 6 — the book treats the vetting failure as an institutional default rather than a mystery, so the missing name may simply be uninteresting to Herron. Medium on 7, which may be an editing seam rather than a design.