Marcus Longridge

Who they are

An ex-soldier out of Ops who arrived at Slough House in the same fortnight as Shirley Dander. The house assumes, as houses do, that a slow horse has lost his nerve. Marcus did not: he gambles, and the debts put him here, and a counsellor’s report has made him impossible to sack. He says so himself, late, when it costs him something to.

He is the most conventionally capable person in the building, which is the book’s quiet joke and its quiet horror. He is the one who notices the exits, gets the equipment off Louisa Guy before it gets her killed, tapes a gun under a conference table, and shoots three men in an afternoon, killing two of them. Nothing about the killing damages him visibly, and the book does not supply a verdict on that.

What they want

At first, a quiet life and a working cover story; later, to be on the right side of whatever is happening at the Needle. He is not ambitious. He is trying to stay solvent and unremarked, and the plot makes both impossible.

Book 2 — Dead Lions

• C01 — Forces the conversation with Shirley, supplies the house gossip, and decides Lamb enjoys his authority rather than resenting it.
• C02 — Reads the platform footage, guesses the train’s likely direction, and delivers the folder to Lamb.
• C08 — On the tube, calls Pashkin a gangster; the argument about whether he ordered Min’s death goes on around it.
• C10 — Takes Louisa’s spray and cuffs off her and tells her the truth about what would have happened; warns her he will neutralise any threat to the principal.
• C13 — Says gambling, not lost nerve, put him here, and denies being Taverner’s line into the house.
• C15 — Produces the taped gun, hits Kyril, and follows Pashkin down to the sixty-fifth floor and then the roof, where he shoots him.
• C16 — Shares an office with Shirley in mutual suspicion, both of them wrong about the other.

Book 3 — Real Tigers

• C01 — At the bar only because Ho knows about his office-hours casino sites; he threatens to break every bone in Ho’s body.
• C02–C04 — Sent with Shirley to find River, finds nothing, reads her break-up over ice cream and proposes a partnership.
• C07–C08 — Flicks CDs, then says what nobody else does about the hostage photograph: she doesn’t look frightened.
• C09 — Wins £160, forges Lamb’s signature at a Service range, then returns to the machines; sacked for going AWOL and gambling.
• C10–C11 — Sacked and driving west anyway, on his read that Donovan wants something real; argues with a policeman while Shirley works.
• C12–C13 — Takes one gun from the boot, counts seven Arrows on the wasteground, and is knocked down and carried to the black van.
• C14–C15 — Tells Duffy to get on with it; the revolver taped in his cap is found, and he kicks free and hunts Duffy until River saves him.

The sacking is what makes him move; the book lets the gambler’s nerve pass for the soldier’s.

Book 4 — Spook Street

• C01 — Waterboards Shirley with a jug and a flannel, then defends it: blowing up forty-two kids is murder, waterboarding a suspected terrorist to death is “housekeeping”. Alone at his screen he counts the final demands in his drawer and works out that his death-in-service payout would clear everything.
• C04 — Takes Louisa’s elbow when she nearly goes for Moira and sits her down, holds the room together, and answers her theory that River is alive with the flat objection that he would have surfaced by now.
• C05 — Is told by Coe, when he challenges him, that Coe is not afraid of him; explains triangulation to Shirley in the simplest terms and lets her ring Molly Doran over his misgivings about River’s earlier attempt to steal a file.
• C07 — Draws the inference from the Henry file that the agent has become unstable.
• C08 — Works the snatch on Sam Chapman: reads the man thrown through the library window as a professional, tells Shirley that Ho is “a little prick” and that he hates relying on him, and drives a black cab through the garage gates to put Patrice down and save Louisa.
• C09 — Relives the failed snatch, having told garage owner Stan that they were Duty Men pursuing a VAT defaulter, and feels his luck turning because he wrecked a cab that was not his.
• C11 — Recognises the gunman on the Pentonville Road video as the man from the garage that afternoon; the chapter also sets out his money trouble in full — the debts, the red letters — with no solution in sight.
• C13 — Alone at his desk he says out loud, “I have a gambling problem”, takes out the gun he means to sell to Dancer for a couple of hundred, and talks himself out of going upstairs to ask Catherine for help; the section ends with him hearing someone on the staircase. He is found in C13’s last section thrown back in his chair, shot through the forehead, with a gun on the floor and his own single shot in the desk. The text never shows the shooting — Patrice comes up the stairs, and it is Shirley who finds him.

The gun he meant to sell is the one on the floor beside him, and the book kills him in the room his debts had left him alone in.

Tells

The soldier’s economy: he says the flat true thing and lets it sit (“He’s a gangster”). He takes other people’s equipment off them as a reflex — the spray, the cuffs — and then hands out the axe. A phone that rings and is answered out of earshot. He volunteers his own disgrace in the middle of an argument, which is either honesty or a way to end it.

Open questions

Who he was speaking to on the street in C06, if not a bookie. Whether Shirley will ever believe he is not Taverner’s man, given that neither of them knows the claim was invented. What it costs him to kill two people in a building full of witnesses and be thanked for it; he does not say.