Regent's Park

What it is

Service headquarters — “the Park” — and the place everyone in Slow Horses is either trying to get back to or to survive. It is never described in much physical detail; what Slow Horses gives instead is its texture: hub floors, glass walls, achievers on the doors, committee rooms, and the particular silence of a building where everyone is senior to someone.

Geography as the text supports it

The building has a hub, a glass-walled office used by the Second Desk, a lift lobby, and a car park at the back where the SUV is left. The committee rooms are elsewhere, in Whitehall.

Book 1 — Slow Horses

• C04 — Diana Taverner prepares to run the response; Nick Duffy reports; the memory stick is locked away.
• C16 — Jackson Lamb drives a hijacked SUV into it, hands over his gun, and bluffs a bomb to empty the building. River Cartwright enters through the boot and walks onto the hub in James Webb’s suit.

Book 2 — Dead Lions

The Park is where Dead Lions puts the people who are not doing the work, and the book’s contempt is structural rather than personal: the building is busy, senior and wrong.

• C06 — Diana Taverner summons James Webb over the seconded slow horses and, on learning he is cultivating Arkady Pashkin, lets him carry on — a decision that costs nothing at the time.
• C12 — Jackson Lamb camps outside until Nick Duffy is sent to move him on, then walks in by holding the botched vetting of Rebecca Mitchell over Duffy’s head, and goes down to Records.
• C14 — With Tearney out of the country, Roger Barrowby, chair of Limitations, is the senior officer present; Taverner counts him down until he authorises a response to the Code September warning.
• C16 — Barrowby takes the blame for emptying the Square Mile and resigns; Taverner’s claim to have a source inside Slough House is revealed to have been invented to unsettle Lamb.

Book 3 — Real Tigers

Real Tigers puts the Park’s authority in question: it can arrest a slow horse in its own basement but cannot stop a minister ordering its business.

• C03 — Ingrid Tearney chairs a resources meeting where four of the five Second Desks are furniture, and refuses Diana Taverner a deputy for being too efficient.
• C04 — River Cartwright bluffs past the front desk by asking for Taverner, reaches the records level, and Molly Doran says the file is the Prime Minister’s.
• C05 — River is held in a windowless basement room with a one-way mirror and interrogated by Nick Duffy; Tearney is told only that a slow horse was caught.
• C08 — Duffy walks River out with threats dressed as career advice; the Park releases him without charge or explanation.
• C10 — Tearney briefs Duffy to follow Sean Donovan alone and kill him once the files are taken, then revises the plan when she learns Virgil files were moved.

Book 4 — Spook Street

Spook Street puts a First Desk in the chair who has to be told what his own Service has done, and a Second Desk who decides what he is told.

• C03 — Claude Whelan, a week into the job, rehearses the Westacres brief — the hijacked tweet, the three sixteen-year-olds hired to supply music for a flash mob, the stranger calling himself Dwight Passenger — signs three copies of papers he has not read, and has his briefing criticised by Diana Taverner, who also warns him about GCHQ.
• C04 — On the South Bank Taverner orders Emma Flyte to collect and isolate Giti Rahman, produces a warrant bearing Whelan’s signature, then takes it back and sets the reporting chain herself.
• C05 — Whelan’s first COBRA: the PM’s questions expose the gaps in the Robert Winters case — no conversion, no affiliation, no video message — and Taverner then walks him onto a bus to tell him Winters was a cold body, that his passport was issued for a two-year-old, and that Whelan signed the Rahman warrant before he briefed the PM.
• C12 — Taverner works out that David Cartwright could have supplied the cold-body identities, concludes the bombers did not know Westacres was coming, and steers Whelan towards a shoot-to-kill order against Patrice and River Cartwright; Whelan objects that River is not an enemy of the state, then reaches for the phone to call the PM.
• C15 — Whelan concedes that Les Arbres was originally funded and resourced by the Service, that Project Cuckoo trained young men who believed their own cover stories — one of them Yves, travelling as Robert Winters — and that Frank Harkness is at liberty again; the Service, he says, means to suppress its own involvement. The account is given off the record, on Lamb’s terms, with no recording and nothing official.

Open questions

Who actually controls it at the end: Tearney is airborne, Taverner is compromised by the Fiasco file, and Lamb has walked out with what he wanted.