Sam Chapman
Who they are
A former Head Dog — Nick Duffy’s predecessor — sacked after “a high-profile mess involving an industrial amount of money” left him with no job, no pension and no reference. He now works for a detective agency that finds runaway teenagers, or at least takes credit-card details from their parents.
He is what the Service does to its own people, standing in a laundrette holding an envelope: the book’s one scene with him is also its clearest picture of the afterlife waiting for anyone who is inconvenient.
What they want
To be useful to Jackson Lamb for money, and to say “I told you so” to the institution that sacked him. He gets both, in one conversation, over a washing machine.
Book 2 — Dead Lions
- C08 — Meets Lamb in a laundrette near Swiss Cottage and hands over a report on Rebecca Mitchell, the driver who killed Min Harper: ten clean years, and before that a flat shared with two Russians from Vladivostok who set her up in business. He also warns Lamb that someone was ahead of him on the same enquiry.
Book 4 — Spook Street
- C08 — Three mornings into failing to find Chelsea Barker, he dismisses his itchy feelings and then obeys them; Patrice, who has been ordered to kill him, spooks him deliberately and hunts him through the backstreets to a garage forecourt. He takes a crowbar to him and has his knee broken for it, and is only got out when Marcus Longridge drives a black cab through the gates.
- C09 — Ices the knee in Lamb’s office and, prompted by the name Les Arbres, gives the inside account of the trips: Cartwright’s junior Dog and minder, eight male adults at the house, the ex-KGB Yevgeny, the American Frank apparently in charge, and Cartwright drunk on the last night saying twice that he wished he had never heard of Project Cuckoo.
- C11 — Gentles the O.B. through Lamb’s interrogation of him, supplying the questions and twice telling Lamb to stop.
- C13 — Apologises to Catherine Standish for the interrogation after Charles Partner’s death, drops a boiling kettle on Patrice’s head, and throws a chair at him — takes a bullet in the side for it, and is then shot in the head where he has barricaded himself alone, in one of the offices at Slough House.
He is killed for having been Cartwright’s minder a quarter of a century earlier, and the book gives him one apology and one job left undone.
Tells
The professional’s disgust at tradecraft done badly, the running joke about being killed for what he knows, and the way he measures every favour in what it would have cost him in his old job.
Open questions
Who else ran the numbers on Rebecca Mitchell before Chapman did — he says someone was ahead of him, and the book never names them.