Alison Dunn

Who they are

A captain who was killed in the crash Sean Donovan was driving, some six years before Real Tigers. She was engaged to Ben Traynor at the time of her death. In this book she is a photograph in a breast pocket, a redacted file, a brother held at a farmhouse, and a name that surfaces on the Service intranet.

The contradiction is that everyone has a use for her and nobody in the book knew her. Donovan carries her as the death he served five years for; Traynor as the woman he was going to marry; Diana Taverner as the loose end she had killed; Ingrid Tearney as the proof of Taverner’s scheming; Catherine Standish as the reason the folder matters. What she found in New York is the one thing the book states plainly and never shows.

What they want

Nothing. She is dead before the book begins; the report she filed after the UN posting is the nearest thing to a motive, and it is redacted. The living want different things from her: Donovan wants his sentence re-read, Traynor wants the record corrected, Taverner wants her to stay a traffic accident, and Tearney needs her death to be Taverner’s doing.

Book 3 — Real Tigers

• C11 — Named first as Donovan’s passenger and Traynor’s fiancée: the death he went to prison for, and the link between two soldiers.
• C12 — A redacted report she filed after the UN posting surfaces in Service records; Traynor carries her photograph into the archive.
• C14 — Ho’s search finds her mother, her brother Craig, and her fiancé; Taverner remembers spiking a drink, tampering with a car, and letting Donovan take the blame.
• C15 — Catherine argues the folder is proof Dunn was murdered, not the Grey Books; Lamb doubts Tearney ran a wet operation.
• C16 — Taverner explains Project Waterproof and says Dunn learned of it in New York, from a delegate from a former Soviet republic.

Tells

There is no tell, because there is no scene: she exists in other people’s sentences. The photograph is the nearest thing to a characteristic, and the redacted report is the nearest thing to a voice. Watch what each speaker needs from her — a death to serve, a murder to prove, a loose end to close — and how little of it is about Alison Dunn.

Open questions

What the redacted report said, and who redacted it. Who the delegate was, and whether he is still available to be asked. Most of all, whether Donovan knew by the end that he had gone to prison for a murder he did not commit, or only suspected it.