Sylvester Monteith

Who they are

The man in the grey suit on the Barbican footbridge, later named as Sylvester Monteith and identified as the man behind Black Arrow: a second-tier security firm that picked up government contracts because of a friendship, with a squad of part-time soldiers. The friendship was with Peter Judd, and it is the whole of his standing. Judd hires him to run a tiger team against the Service, and Monteith hires Sean Donovan and Ben Traynor to do the work.

The contradiction is that he believes he is the operation when he is only its contractor. He takes iced tea in Postman’s Park, under tiles commemorating heroic self-sacrifice, and reflects that he lit the cannon rather than threw himself in front of it — a joke that is also an accurate self-assessment. He orders a woman frightened so that he can say he made her squeal, then sneers once too often at the man who does the frightening, and is killed by a single blow from him.

What they want

To be owed, and to be seen to have arranged it. He wants Judd to need him, the Service humiliated, and the ex-soldiers on his payroll to remember who hired them. The small, revealing part of the brief is that he wants a captive to have been scared, because a clean test of security would leave him with nothing to tell anybody about.

Book 3 — Real Tigers

• C02 — The grey-suited stranger on the footbridge, still unnamed, who shows River the photograph and gives him eighty minutes.
• C04 — Named in Postman’s Park, where he drinks iced tea beneath the tiles and orders Donovan to put a scare into the prisoner.
• C06 — Waits in a car park for a celebration, sneers at Donovan’s background, sacks him, and gives up Judd’s restaurant before running.
• C07 — His body is dumped on a pavement in SW1; Ho establishes that he ran Black Arrow and was at school with Judd.
• C08 — Donovan’s account: he broke free, was caught, and hit once harder than intended. A stunt has produced a body.

Tells

Iced tea in a heatwave; the grey suit; a taste for standing under memorials. He talks about other people’s heroism as though it were a line item. He runs — out of the car park, out of his jacket — and expects everyone else to stay put while he does it. The sneer at Donovan’s background is the mistake the whole operation turns on.

Open questions

Whether Judd knew the tiger team would be staffed with real ex-soldiers and real weapons, or whether Monteith assembled that himself. What Black Arrow’s other government contracts were. And whether he ever understood that the one man in the car park he could not afford to insult was the one holding the van keys.