Ingrid Tearney

Who they are

First Desk — the head of the Service — and conveniently out of the country for the whole crisis, first in Washington and then airborne over the Atlantic. She is the novel’s absent authority: everything Taverner does is done in the space Tearney leaves.

What they want

Plausible deniability and a Service that does not embarrass the government. She authorises arrests from a plane and never has to see a body.

Book 1 — Slow Horses

• C04 — In DC, leaving Taverner to front the response to the video.
• C06 — Still in Washington, leaving Taverner to brief the committee.
• C09 — Named as the person Taverner means to pre-empt.
• C11 — Airborne, told Lamb has gone rogue, authorises the arrests and the cover-up.
• C12 — Invoked in an email joke among the slow horses.

Book 3 — Real Tigers

• C03 — Chairs the resources meeting, freezes Desk-support recruitment and denies Taverner a deputy, citing Taverner’s own efficiency.
• C05 — Told only that a slow horse has been caught, she lets Duffy finish and files the incursion as probably nothing.
• C06 — Summoned to the Home Office, she works out that the tiger team was Judd’s, and that he has her by the throat.
• C06 — Trades an alliance and the closure of Slough House for a waiver, tells him to consider it done, then asks after the staff.
• C07 — Admits in St Giles Cripplegate that the closure is Judd showing her where power lies, then hires Lamb off the books for The Grey Books.
• C10 — Briefs Nick Duffy to kill Donovan once the files are taken, then learns files classed Virgil moved and changes the plan.
• C13 — Alone under her lamp she reconstructs Alison Dunn’s death and Donovan’s ruin, and sees the Grey Books were a decoy.

She spends Duffy, the Arrows and a story told to a parliamentary committee, and calls the arithmetic steadiness. Her elimination order is the one move in the book she cannot verify.

Tells

Distance as a management style. She is never in a room with anyone who can be hurt by her decisions.

Open questions

Whether she knows the kidnapping was Taverner’s operation, or only learns it later — and what she does with the knowledge.