Douglas
Who they are
The caretaker of The archive: the only person on duty at the Service’s off-site store for the The Grey Books, and — as the book says plainly — unvetted. He watches the CCTV monitors from a console, works alone, and has no idea that the records he is guarding are worth killing for. He is the entire security of the Service’s Virgil-level archive, and he is talked into opening the hatch by Louisa Guy in about a minute.
Book 3 — Real Tigers
- C11 — Checks the visitors’ story, refuses at first, then lets River Cartwright and Louisa through the hatch and admits the two men waiting above — the decision that ends him.
- C12 — Sent up the ladder to raise the alarm, he surfaces onto the wasteground and is dragged into a van by a man in a balaclava claiming to be from Regent’s Park; Nick Duffy shoots him and pushes the body under a bench with the line that that is one down, four to go.
Tells
The console chair he keeps swivelling, his horror at having let the wrong people in, and the mobile phone he reaches for a moment too late.
Open questions
Why the Service left a Virgil-level archive in the charge of one unvetted man, and whether anyone ever told his family what happened to him.