Upshott

What it is

A Cotswold village with a pub, a shop, a church, a Ministry of Defence range on the site of an old USAF base, an airstrip, and not much else. Dead Lions introduces it in C07 as a place with no history of its own — which is the point: the history was manufactured, and the ordinariness is the camouflage.

Geography as the text supports it

• The nearest station is Moreton-in-Marsh; from there it is a taxi ride, the one Kenny Muldoon drives.
• The pub is the Downside Man; the shop sells seeds, and Nikolai Katinsky sells them as Tommy Moult.
• The MoD range has a wire fence with a cut in it, ruined farm buildings, and bronze-age barrows the artillery never targets. A second entrance near the village was cemented shut.
• The flying club has a clubhouse, a hangar, and a calendar with days crossed out in red; Kelly Tropper flies from its airstrip.
• The church, St John of the Cross — “St Johnno’s” — has a churchyard and a bell tower.

Book 2 — Dead Lions

• C04 — Shirley Dander traces the bald man from the station CCTV to Moreton-in-Marsh, and Muldoon admits he drove him on to Upshott.
• C07 — The village tour. River Cartwright has been here three weeks as “Jonathan Walker”, a thriller writer, and is sleeping with Kelly Tropper; the last page of her sketchpad is a skyscraper struck by lightning.
• C09 — Griff Yates shows River the cut in the range fence; an old pub photograph shows the flying club’s nine young members with Kelly at their centre.
• C11 — Roderick Ho reports seventeen families who moved in between March and June 1991, none connected to the airbase; Moult is not among the names.
• C15 — Katinsky’s own bomb brings down the church wall and the bell tower, killing him; the public record calls it a localised earth tremor with a single fatality.

Why it matters

The sleeper network is hidden in the least suspicious place available: an English village where every resident has a plausible past, and where those pasts were built before records went online. The joke Dead Lions builds on it is that the cicadas slept so long they became villagers, and that when the call finally comes nobody answers.

Open questions

How many of the seventeen were witting; what the village becomes after the church falls; and whether Moult’s absence from Ho’s list means he was the handler or that the list itself was incomplete.