The flight fund

Definition

An envelope containing fifteen hundred pounds, a passport and a key to a box in a French bank: the means to disappear if the Service ever decided to come for you.

Jackson Lamb keeps his pinned behind the noticeboard in his office. Jed Moody takes it — it is in the envelope on his body in C08 — and River works out what it was in C10, revising his opinion of Lamb from “joke” to “joe”.

Book 1 — Slow Horses

It is Slow Horses’s measure of professional seriousness. A man who keeps a flight fund believes his own institution might kill him; a man who does not is a tourist. River’s reading of it (“he keeps a flight fund and would not have sent us for the others if he meant to run”) is what convinces the horses to trust Lamb in C11 — the object does plot work as well as character work.

In C17 the fund is back behind the noticeboard, which is the book’s way of saying Lamb has decided to stay and fight rather than leave.

Related

Jackson Lamb · Jed Moody · River Cartwright · Off-the-books operations