57 pages • 1 hour read
Mick HerronSlow Horses
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 14-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Sly Whores”
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary
Lamb arrives at Catherine Standish’s flat. He tells her that everyone associated with Slough House is in trouble. She dismisses the news about Jed Moody’s death, though she is upset that Sid has been injured.
They are intercepted by Duffy. Spider Webb is driving, and Duffy informs the two that they will be taken to Regent’s Park for questioning. Loy has falsely confessed that the slow horses are responsible for the operation. Lamb sneezes and asks Catherine for a tissue. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a gun she finds that Lamb had earlier placed there. She aims it at Spider. Duffy and Spider exit the car.
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary
The group reconvene at Blake’s grave. White and Loy have been picked up by Regent’s Park, but River, Min, Louisa, and Ho gather to wait. Lamb and Catherine quickly appear. Lamb confirms River’s earlier suspicions: The kidnapping was an op headed by Taverner. Now that Black has been killed and Hassan is in mortal danger, she is pinning the blame on Slough House. Worse, because she has been running the operation in secret, she has not informed the police of the whereabouts of the kidnappers or the hostage. Now that Alan Black is dead, nobody knows where the hostage has been taken.
River remembers that he saw Black somewhere before he was killed. When he tells the group, Lamb says that he and River will go to Regent’s Park and confront Taverner. When Catherine points out that none of this helps Hassan, Lamb simply shrugs. The rest of the team can do as they like. Catherine believes that Lamb wants them to find Hassan and that he has kept them safe from Regent’s Park in order to help.
Curly and Larry are in the car; Hassan has been bound, gagged, and thrown into the trunk. His focus is fading.
Part 2, Chapter 16 Summary
Lamb and River go to Slough House. Lamb sends River inside, and he searches Moody’s corpse.
Catherine, Min, Louisa, and Ho decamp to a nearby café for some food and brainstorming. They investigate the house where Alan Black was killed. When this yields nothing useful, Catherine decides that Taverner must have used an old identity as a cover story for Black. They find an alias, Dermot Radcliffe, and Ho searches his credit-card activity.
Meanwhile, Larry becomes increasingly frightened of the consequences of what they have done. Curly knows that, if they are caught, they will be shot on sight: He has no intention of being caught and is willing to sacrifice Larry to ensure that. He programs the GPS, and Hassan hears the satnav speaking.
Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary
Catherine and the others continue to search for the hostage location. Ho discovers that a car was rented under Black’s alias. He puts in a call to other hackers to break into the navigation system so that they can track the car.
Meanwhile, Lamb pulls up to Regent’s Park in the Duffy’s SUV and demands to talk to Taverner.
Spider is uncomfortable. After the incident with Lamb and the car, he realizes he knows very little. Used to being in the loop, Spider wants information but is afraid to upset Taverner. If Lamb is on the loose, he needs to know.
Hassan becomes more alert upon hearing the satnav. The kidnappers have taken him to Epping Forest, 20 miles outside of London, which the slow horses discover via Ho’s hacking community. Catherine places a call to the authorities, who, they hope, will be dispatched in time.
Taverner bluntly informs Lamb that he is being set up to take the fall for the botched operation. She insinuates that Sid Baker has died and that one of his own agents has volunteered to vouch for her accusations. Alan Black had once been at Slough House, so his involvement can also be explained. Taverner again threatens the treason charges that could be brought against Catherine. She believes that she has convinced him, but Lamb has other ideas: He tells her that the SUV he returned, now parked inside the property, has been planted with a bomb.
Someone puts a gun to Spider’s head.
Curly and Larry are arguing. Curly wants to go through with the beheading, but Larry wants to walk away. Hassan has had enough: He decides if he is going to die, he is going to do so with dignity. He mocks the kidnappers and tells them to shut up. Curly flies into a rage and swings his axe.
Lamb has bluffed about the bomb. He was creating a distraction, Taverner realizes, just as Spider realizes that it is River holding him at gunpoint. River wants the files about his training exercise: He knows that Spider would keep them, as he plays by the “London rules” of self-protection just like his boss, Taverner.
Hassan wakes groggily. Curly has struck him with the handle of the axe, intending to execute Hassan on camera. Hassan tries to run while Larry and Curly are still arguing. Curly enjoys the sight of him hobbling away, knowing he will catch him.
River comes into Taverner’s office wearing Spider’s clothes. He confronts Taverner with the evidence from the file on his training exercise, which Spider has labeled “Fiasco.” In it is a photograph that River had taken when he was following Taverner as part of his training: She is sitting in a coffeeshop opposite Alan Black. Taverner had wanted River out of Regent’s Park because he had seen her with Black, arranging the kidnapping plot. Lamb makes a deal with Taverner: If Hassan dies, he will unleash River to do what he thinks is best; if Hassan survives, then he will use the information as leverage.
Curly chases the limping Hassan into the forest. He trips, spraining his ankle, and Hassan is able to wrest the axe away from him. Hassan demands Curly give him any reason to show restraint, but Curly’s response is garbled. Hassan, disgusted, decides to walk away. When he reaches the main road, he sees flashing lights and people rushing toward him.
Part 2, Chapter 18 Summary
The authorial narrative voice that opened the novel again surveys Slough House. Struan Loy’s and Kay White’s desks are empty. Louisa and Min share their office space, him sitting on the edge of her desk. River toils alone in his office, with only a barrette to mark the space where Sid once worked. Ho is secluded, as usual, though his thoughts toward his colleagues, especially Catherine, have softened. They have been told that Robert Hobden was killed in a hit-and-run accident.
Lamb is alone in his office, thinking about what happens to old spies. He finally tells Roderick Ho why he himself is at Slough House: Lamb had been responsible for an agent’s death. Lamb fails to mention that the agent in question was Charles Partner. Lamb’s thoughts show obliquely that David Cartwright was also involved. He feels guilty that Catherine Standish discovered the body and has tried, in his own way, to make amends for that. All spies eventually sell out for something, he muses. He accepted his exile to Slough House in exchange for what he thought would be “peace and quiet” (334). But in light of recent events, he ponders the potential options. He could stay and keep things as they are; he could abscond if events warrant his disappearance. Or perhaps, he muses, he might not be as tired of the action as he once thought.
Part 2, Chapters 14-18 Analysis
Catherine Standish comes into her own in the last chapters, increasingly a personification of the theme Forgiveness, Redemption, and Second Chances. Even Jackson Lamb is surprised by her composure when he informs her of the trouble in which Slough House finds itself. She handles a gun calmly against Duffy and Spider. Louisa notices that, in the midst of the excitement, “she didn’t much look like Catherine […] the spark in her eyes was out of the ordinary. Perhaps she was enjoying this adventure” (271). The slow horses, having underestimated her, learn that she possesses valuable information and instincts that make her the natural leader of the team when Lamb is absent. The rehabilitation of her character in the eyes of the slow horses mirrors their joint rehabilitation in the reader’s perception.
Catherine’s courage and confidence is sound because of her clear sense of Allegiance, Betrayal, and Loyalty: “She had barely a glimmer of what was happening here,” when Duffy and Spider take them into the SUV, “but there was a certain comfort in knowing whose side she was on” (265). That is, Standish takes it for granted that she and Lamb are on the same side, that her loyalties lie with the man who asked for her presence at Slough House after Charles Partner died.
The loyalty expressed by Lamb to his team and, in turn, by Catherine to Lamb begins to extend to the entire Slough House crew: They all show up at Blake’s grave on Lamb’s command, and Lamb himself returns to give them (mis)direction While he dismissively tells them that he does not care if they search for Hassan, his actions suggest otherwise. Catherine, for one, is convinced that he kept them out of Regent’s Park’s crosshairs in order to be of service, while Roderick Ho expresses his desire “to prove [Lamb] wrong” (280). While he uses a slightly more colorful description in place of his boss’s name, Ho expresses a heretofore hidden desire to put his computer skills to good work. All of them come together, united in a common cause.
This is in direct contrast to the backstabbing and betrayal conducted by Taverner and her minions at Regent’s Park. Lamb is immediately aware of what is going on, which is why he tries to evacuate himself and his team: “She’s rewriting the timeline. She’s putting Slough House in the frame” (264). Lamb is especially disturbed by the ease with which she dispatches her own agents in the service of her larger schemes. To him, this is the ultimate treachery. Taverner’s threat to expose Catherine Standish’s potentially treasonous activities only drives him to despise and distrust Taverner more. Her hubris also leads her to make miscalculations. She believes she has Lamb trapped, that his loyalty to Catherine Standish will induce him to sacrifice himself in order to save her. But it is she who has trapped herself. In her monomaniacal determination to dispatch Lamb, she misjudges his resourcefulness. As she waits for him to concede, she thinks she has won the battle: “she felt like a whaler must feel, watching the first harpoon strike flesh” (309). Herron here makes an allusion to the novel Moby-Dick, whose whaler, Ahab, is destroyed by his obsessional pursuit of the whale. This foreshadows the denouement.
Spider Webb, too, gets his comeuppance. His rivalry with River has benefited him, up until current events. He has enjoyed serving the powerful Diana Taverner and taking responsibility for River’s exile to Slough House, but his disloyalty eventually catches up with him. He resents the fact that he has been “sidelined”: “right now River seemed to be at the centre of events, because it was the slow horses that had everyone uptight” (298). This upends his view on how the world should operate. He admits that he had been motivated, in part, by jealousy: “River was better than him at most things; so much so, he didn’t have to make a big show of it” (314). While he is immediately rewarded for following his baser instincts, the tables turn as River, Lamb, and his slow horses retake control of the narrative.
It becomes increasingly clear all the slow horses have been changed by recent events. Slough House itself has been energized, and all its agents reveal their respective talents: Louisa and Min flush out an intruder; Roddy uses his hacking skills to help rather than to harm or self-serve; and River employs his powers of recall, not to mention his tracking skills, to expose Taverner’s misdeeds. As Min puts it, “Slough House went live” (297). Recent events have reinvigorated the much-maligned slow horses. Still, the habits of the slow horses die hard, as they say. Ho notes, when they are tracking the hostage, “All this time, Catherine’s trotting off to the call phone in the corner. And I’ve got my mobile in my pocket” (315). Which may be the exact reason why, as Ho also notes later, “Catherine Standish called him Roddy” (331). There is a fondness in the nickname that is derived from mutual respect and amused affection. Hassan too, is freed from the confines the narrative place him in until now, becoming the hero of his own story. Hassan shows a mercy and tolerance of which Curly is incapable. Hassan says to Curly before he walks away, “You make me ashamed I’m British” (328), an overt reference to the novel’s thematic exploration of patriotism.
The novel ends with a recap of the characters of Slough House and Lamb’s contemplation of events, bookending the opening chapter in order to provide a sense of structural completeness. This completeness is balanced by the new mysteries introduced in the final pages, characteristic of the genre: Sidonie Baker’s disappearance and Lamb’s revelations about Catherine and Partner.
