Richard Bough

Who they are

A retired Berlin hand of the old sort: a streetwalker who was good at following people and paid for his evenings by trading the gossip he picked up in a nightclub. Known to everyone as Dickie Bow. When the Wall came down the Service stopped needing what he could do, and he spent the years after it on black coffee, Guinness, whisky chasers and ex-wives.

He is the book’s first death, and the one nobody in it has any use for except as bait. He recognised a bald Muscovite in a Soho pub, followed him onto a stranded train and a replacement coach out of Reading, and was killed for the recognition — not for anything he knew, because he did not know anything. The one-word message that sets the plot running, Cicadas, was not his: it was put on his phone for whoever came looking. A man died carrying a message he had not written and could not have explained.

What they want

To deliver an important message to the right person, having no idea what the message is or who that person might be. Underneath that, the older want: to be useful again, once.

Book 2 — Dead Lions

• C00 — Follows the bald man through the crush at Reading and onto the third coach, and dies in his seat short of Oxford; the coach arrives one passenger short.
• C03 — David Cartwright puts a name to him: a minor Berlin hand who vanished in September 1989 and returned claiming Alexander Popov had kidnapped and forcibly drunk him.
• C06 — Lamb concludes the sabotaged fusebox and the unsent text were bait laid for Bow and for anyone who followed him; the word would have meant nothing to him.
• C15 — Katinsky confirms the abduction was real: Bow was taken, used to give the Popov legend a living witness, and released.

Tells

The drink of a man who has stopped counting, and the tradecraft that has not stopped with it — he keeps the man in view through a crowd without deciding to. No ticket, no watch, no destination. A phone with no messages on it, checked anyway.

Open questions

What he actually saw in the Soho pub, and how long it took him to place the face. Whether he ever tried to sell the 1989 story to anyone who believed it. Whether he knew he was being followed in turn.