Sean Donovan

Who they are

A former lieutenant colonel — Balkans, then NATO in Kosovo, once reckoned to be in the running for higher things — who served five years for causing death by dangerous driving and has been out for thirteen months. The passenger who died was Alison Dunn, and Catherine Standish was his lover before the trial. He is waiting for her outside Slough House on the first night of the heatwave, and by the end of the evening she is in the back of his van.

The contradiction is that he is the operation’s conscience. He apologises to his prisoner and does not look sorry; he kills Sylvester Monteith with one punch and calls it murder; he wants a folder as proof that a death was murder, and it is the death he is already serving time for. Five years of being the man who caused a death have left him unable to become the man who causes another, which is why he leaves the body where it will be found and why he stays behind at the end.

What they want

To have the crash re-read: a folder that shows Alison Dunn was killed for something she knew, and a name to attach to it. He is not a free agent in this — Diana Taverner found him drinking himself to death and gave him a culprit, and he has been working towards Ingrid Tearney ever since. He tells his employers he is after the Grey Books. What he asks for in the last hour is smaller: that the folder reach Catherine, with his apology.

Book 3 — Real Tigers

• C01 — Waits for Catherine, catches her at the corner, and hands her into the van; five years inside, thirteen months out.
• C02 — Drunk, he asks which of her colleagues she would trust with her life, and shows that he already knows the answer matters.
• C04 — Drives into London from the west, passes on the order to frighten her, then comes up to apologise without looking sorry.
• C06 — Refuses to celebrate, calls Judd a piece of shit, is sacked, and forces the restaurant’s name out of Monteith.
• C08 — Admits the punch that killed Monteith went in harder than he meant, and dumps the body where it cannot be quietly buried.
• C10 — Meets River and Louisa on the wasteground, promises Catherine’s release, and sends them in first to open the doors.
• C14 — Praises Louisa’s soldiering, takes a shoulder wound and a worse one in the thigh, and watches Traynor shot beside him.
• C15 — Too badly hurt to move, sends the folder to Catherine with his apology, asks for his gun, and stays behind.

Tells

The apology that arrives a beat before or after the damage. A soldier’s habit of confirming a schedule by telephone, and of calling the woman he abducted by her full name. He will not unbend to a man he has decided is a fool, and he keeps saying that murder is over the line — as if the line were his to draw.

Open questions

Whether he ever believed the story that Ingrid Tearney ordered Dunn’s death, or knew he was being pointed and preferred the version that let him keep walking. What he expected Catherine to do with the folder. And how he died: the book records only that he was left wounded and armed in the storage room, and later that he was dead.