The farmhouse

What it is

A converted farmhouse an hour or more outside London where Catherine Standish is held for most of Real Tigers: an attic room that was once a nursery, with a barred window, a narrow bed, and a bathroom stripped of anything that could be used as a weapon. The door is padlocked from the outside and the house is staffed by amateurs with instructions.

Geography as the text supports it

• The attic room: barred window, narrow bed, bare boards, a door that opens only inward.
• A landing and stairs, and a front door that is the building’s weakest point.
• A yard with a double-decker bus in it — the detail that lets Roderick Ho find the place on a map before he drives the bus through the door.
• Farmland around it, far enough from London that a car journey is measured in hours.

Book 3 — Real Tigers

• C02 — Catherine wakes here, photographed with her own phone; a tattooed northern guard she privately names Craig Dunn cuffs and gags her, and Sean Donovan visits to ask which of her colleagues she would trust with her life.
• C11 — A bottle of wine is left with her food; alone for a full day, she breaks the seal.
• C12 — She pours the wine down the sink and refills the bottle with water as a weapon; Jackson Lamb kicks the door in, eats her sandwich, and Ho drives the bus through the front of the house on the way out.
• C13 — The unconscious intruder is identified from his licence as Craig Dunn, which is how the farmhouse ties back to the Dunn family.

Why it matters

The farmhouse is where the book keeps the character it is least willing to lose, and it is built as an anti-Slough House: clean, rural, quiet, and run by people who are not professionals. Catherine’s captivity is the book’s measure of her — she does not drink, she takes the guard’s measure, and the only weapon she needs is a bottle of water.

Open questions

Who leased the house, and whether the guard Catherine calls Bailey was one of the Dunn brothers or merely hired muscle.