Open questions

Question

What does Real Tigers deliberately leave unresolved, and which gaps are accidents?

Evidence

• C09, River: “He didn’t pick Standish at random. He already knew her.” Who told Donovan about Slough House is not established.
• C14, Taverner’s memory: she arranged Alison Dunn’s death and framed Donovan for it.
• C16: Taverner opens the folder and finds a blank topsheet marked V-for-Virgil over a copy of the Angling Times; she calls Judd to report “the worst case”.
• C16: Traynor and Donovan dead, Black Arrow and two of Duffy’s men dead, Duffy alive “with limited brain function”; Catherine has resigned; Seb is shot in Lamb’s doorway.
• C16: Taverner expects Tearney retired, herself First Desk, and Judd’s path to Number Ten smoothed in return.

Reading

Deliberate, and pointed forward.

1. Who replaced the Grey Books with a fishing magazine? The folder Donovan died for is a decoy, and nobody in the book takes credit. Lamb hands it to Taverner knowing what is in it, which suggests the substitution was his — but the text never says, and the ambiguity is the joke: the great secret may never have existed.
2. Who told Donovan about Catherine? He knew her, and he knew Slough House was the soft route in. The likely answer is Taverner (who built the tiger team), and the book lets her say enough in C16 to make that plausible without confirming it.
3. Does Taverner get First Desk? She ends the book having traded a death, a kidnapping and a Home Secretary’s favour for a promotion, and the novel stops before the appointment is made.
4. What happens to Judd? His fixer is dead in Lamb’s doorway, and Lamb is reaching for the phone. The series needs him, so the book declines to finish him.

Deliberate, and thematic.

5. What did Catherine’s captivity cost her? She does not drink, she resigns, and she tells Lamb on the motorway what she has understood about Charles Partner. The book leaves her employable and finished with the Service at the same time.
6. Is Duffy’s career over? He is left alive and diminished, which is worse for him than being killed and is the book’s sentence on the Dogs.

Accidental or under-determined.

7. The prologue’s victim. C00 is written as though Lowell dies; C09 says he “hadn’t actually died”. The wiki records the survival, but the prologue’s withholding reads as an artefact of the narration rather than a trick — the reader is not given a reason to doubt it at the time.

Confidence

High that 1–4 are deliberate: each is a decision the book stages and then refuses to close. Medium on 5–6, which are thematic readings rather than puzzles. The item in 7 is an internal inconsistency rather than an open question, and is kept here so it is not mistaken for either.