The Dogs
Definition
The Service’s internal security section: the people who search your flat, sit you in a basement room, and collect you in an SUV before dawn. Nick Duffy heads them; Jed Moody is an ex-Dog; Sam Chapman — “Bad Sam” — is the one who interrogated Catherine Standish after Charles Partner died.
Book 1 — Slow Horses
The Dogs are Slow Horses’s instrument of institutional violence that is not quite violence: everything they do is procedural. They knock, they show authority, they take your gun, they put you in the front seat. The only person who physically attacks one is Jackson Lamb, and the only one who kills is a slow horse defending himself on a staircase.
The distinction Slow Horses keeps drawing is between the Dogs’ orderly coercion and the kidnappers’ disorderly cruelty — and then it undermines the distinction by having the Service order a body disappeared and a house burned.
Book 3 — Real Tigers
Real Tigers gives the Dogs a private war: Nick Duffy’s section works for Ingrid Tearney off the books, and its violence is done by men who think they act for the Service.
- C05 — Duffy interrogates River Cartwright in the Park’s basement with a plastic chair and a tracksuit, calls the abduction story a fairy story, and knees him.
- C08 — Duffy walks River out of the Park with threats phrased as career advice; the section’s power is in what it implies.
- C10 — Tearney briefs Duffy to follow Sean Donovan to his lair and kill him once the files are taken, alone and without back-up.
- C12 — Duffy wears a balaclava, calls himself Park personnel, questions Douglas about the hatchway, shoots him and pushes the body under a bench.
- C14–C15 — He talks a wavering Arrow through the necessity of killing, prepares to execute Marcus Longridge, and is knocked out by River.
Book 4 — Spook Street
Spook Street changes the section’s head and then tests her: the Dogs in this book are procedural, and the procedure keeps being overtaken.
- C03 — Emma Flyte, ex-Met and two months into the job, is the new Head Dog, an appointment the chapter explains by Ingrid Tearney’s misuse of the section having left it in the doghouse; she works the Cartwright scene, gives Jackson Lamb the timeline and takes his insults.
- C04 — Taverner orders her to collect and isolate Giti Rahman; Flyte insists the Dogs are not a private army, demands authority, is shown a warrant signed by Claude Whelan and then has it taken back off her.
- C06 — Having left Rahman locked in a safe house near Brixton market with Dempsey on the door, Flyte takes Devon Welles’s report from the Cartwright house — blood that does not match River — and concludes there are two missing persons.
- C10 — At St Pancras she picks River up on Taverner’s instructions to keep him isolated and not interrogate him, is nagged by the mole on his lip, and loses both the prisoner and her weapon when Patrice takes her gun.
- C14 — She runs Frank Harkness down under Blackfriars Bridge, follows him onto a maintenance platform, fires a warning shot that tears her own coat, and drops Welles’s weapon when armed police arrive from the bridge.
No chapter of Spook Street names Nick Duffy; Flyte’s appointment is the only account the book gives of the change at the top of the section.