Last Stop

Dickie Bow interrupts his working day when he recognises a man passing outside. Recognition comes with memories of captivity, and he sets off after him rather than letting the encounter disappear. The pursuit takes him through London and onto public transport. At first the elderly follower appears to be keeping up with his quarry. By the final bus journey, however, he is struggling to stay conscious. He types a last message into his mobile and pushes the phone between the seats before collapsing. What looks like a natural death has left a concealed witness.

Jackson Lamb visits the bus under cover of being Dickie’s bereaved brother. He softens his manner for the driver, turning apparent confusion and grief into permission to look around. Once left alone, he searches the seats and recovers the phone. The unfinished warning consists of one word: “Cicada”. Lamb’s reaction makes clear that this belongs to the intelligence world he would rather have left behind. The man he is mourning was not an admired colleague, but his death still demands attention.

Back in London, Catherine finds several desks empty for less sinister reasons. River is interviewing for private intelligence work, hoping his experience will outweigh the damage of his current posting. His interviewers are more interested in Jackson Lamb than in him. Min and Louisa have meanwhile met Webb, who wants background security for a meeting with Arkady Pashkin, representative of the wealthy Russian dissident Ilya Nevsky. The prospect of operational work tempts them despite the certainty that Lamb will resent being bypassed.

Lamb assembles the office around Roddy’s computer to reconstruct Dickie’s movements. The footage shows a pursuit, but the missing train recordings prevent them seeing exactly what happened between follower and target. Shirley is sent to retrieve the physical data. She steals an access card and depends on Roddy cutting the electricity at the right moment to get into the storage facility. Their cooperation is hardly smooth, yet she escapes with the drive the investigation needs.

River visits his grandfather and raises Dickie’s death. David explains the old story of Soviet sleeper agents called cicadas and their supposed controller, Alexander Popov. The Service had dismissed the operation as a fiction and Dickie’s account of abduction as an excuse for drunkenness. River is less ready to accept the verdict. When the recovered recordings reveal close contact between Dickie and the man he followed, River concludes that the apparent heart attack was murder. Lamb now has a lead towards the Cotswolds and an eager officer to send after it.