Lech Wicinski

Who they are

Lech Wicinski is the newest slow horse: two days into his posting when the book opens, sharing an office with Roderick Ho and already at war with him over desk space and a broken Clint Eastwood mug. He came from the Hub at Regent’s Park, where he was an analyst, and the first thing the book establishes about him is a negative — when Ho goes looking for his office-mate in Service records, there is no trace of Wicinski at all. His file has been made not to exist, which is the earliest hint that the case against him was built rather than found.

The case is child pornography on his Service laptop. He denies it; the Service’s version is that material was found, that he was interviewed on the record by his line manager Richard Pynne — known to Wicinski as Dick the Prick — and escorted out of the building. No charge has been brought (C03), and the accusation is doing the work by itself: his HR letter bars him from contacting Park staff while the investigation runs, and Jackson Lamb receives him with “Fresh meat”, a cigarette and the accusation before telling him that in Slough House everyone is guilty of something, “Of being in Slough House, if nothing else.”

He is five-eleven, not the six-foot Pole Lamb called him, and lives in a basement flat in Crouch End with his fiancée Sara, who has been told he was seconded over a protocol issue. His Polish grandparents settled on the Northwick Park estate, his two grandfathers having served in the RAF, and a memorial there commemorates ex-servicemen who lived in the huts from 1948 to 1970. That inheritance is what he drives a hundred miles to stand in front of on his first Saturday as a slow horse, instead of buying the pint of milk he left the flat for.

What they want

To be believed, and then reinstated. What he can actually do about it is small and domestic: a mousetrap in a wastepaper bin, warnings to Ho about whistleblowers, one name he asks a former colleague to run through a database before his hearing. Later the want narrows to something simpler — a day in which the word on his face is not the first thing anyone reads.

Book 6 — Joe Country

• C01 — Arrives to find his Service record has been deleted and his bin turned over; the mousetrap he left in it snaps Ho’s fingers, the first sign that he answers humiliation with small, patient traps rather than complaint.
• C02 — Instead of milk he drives west to the estate his grandparents settled, and there remembers the one irregular thing he ever did: running a flagged name through Service search engines as a favour for John Bachelor. He comes back to seven missed calls from Sara.
• C06 — Sara confronts him with the allegations and turns him out; he sleeps in his clothes in his office, and when Lamb dials the Samaritans and holds out the receiver at a pound a minute, he rips the phone from its socket and throws it at the wall.
• C09 — Alone in the building and unwilling to pay for a hotel, he crosses the road for food and is knocked down in the backyard by a man with a blade: someone outside the Service wants him off the board, and nobody has told him why.
• C10 — Found in the green wheelie bin on Saturday morning, filthy and injured, with P-A-E scored into one cheek and D-O into the other — the accusation cut into him so that he carries it wherever he goes.
• C11 — Gives Lamb the only two names he has, Pynne and Peter Kahlmann, and is given a silver-handled razor that Lamb wants back; he takes it into the bathroom and the chapter stops before it says what he does with it.
• C14 — He is back among the slow horses with fresh cross-hatching of cuts over the carved word, the letters obliterated; by then Ho has discovered that every Slough House record has been erased, Wicinski’s included.

Tells

• The mousetrap and the broken mug: his retaliation is domestic, deniable and aimed at the person who wronged him rather than at the institution.
• “That’s what everyone says. Right up until somebody blows the whistle.” Said to Roderick Ho in C04 about Service data theft, it is the nearest he comes to a professional creed.
• He answers questions about himself with facts that do not help him — five-eleven, a hundred miles, two grandfathers in the RAF — as though accuracy were a defence.
• Going dark by staying put: a night in his own office rather than a hotel, which is exactly what puts him in the backyard when the man with the blade arrives.

Open questions

• Who ordered the laptop seeded is not settled on the page. C14 has Lamb accuse the man he knows as Kahlmann, but the chapter reports an accusation, not a confession.
• Whether the laptop finding ever reaches Wicinski’s hearing is left open. In C08 a technician reports that the material cannot be shown to have been downloaded by the certified user and that a state actor may have planted it, at twenty percent likelihood at most; Richard Pynne has her keep it out of her funding bid, deletes her email, and gives Diana Taverner a shortened version. No consequence follows for that either.
• What he did with the razor between C11 and C14 is not shown, only the fresh cuts in the later chapter.
• Whether his record is ever restored — and whether Sara comes back — is outside the book’s frame.