Roger Barrowby
Who they are
The new Chair of Limitations, the Service’s oversight body, and the man whose audit of Regent’s Park hangs over the whole book: in-depth interviews with all staff covering their financial, operational, emotional, psychological, sexual and medical histories — “what was being termed an audit, but might more accurately be called an Inquisition”.
He is not a villain and not a fool, which is what makes him useful to Dead Lions: he is a career officer who wants to be seen pulling the strings, and the one day the strings matter is the day he is left holding them.
What they want
To clean the stables, to be noticed doing it, and — once the alert is called — to be the man who made the decision rather than the man who was carried by it. He gets the first two and the third costs him the job.
Book 2 — Dead Lions
- C01 — His audit is introduced as the reason the Park cannot do anything openly: every officer’s history is being taken apart on the record.
- C14 — With Ingrid Tearney out of the country, Barrowby can claim First Desk. Diana Taverner counts him down on the hub until he authorises the response to the Code September warning — and he is sick with it while he does it.
- C16 — Effectively First Desk when the City’s alarm was sounded, he accepts the blame with a readiness that impresses people, and resigns discreetly, leaving with an imitation Mies van der Rohe chair as a gift.
Tells
The auditor’s habit of standing too close, the assumption that proximity to a decision is the same as authority over it, and the nausea he cannot hide when the decision actually arrives.
Open questions
Whether the resignation is penance or the last competent move available to him, and what the audit will report now that its author has gone.