Jim Fenchurch
Jim is the Special Branch police liaison officer assisting the committee with their new investigation. Jim has a simplistic, perhaps idealistic, view of the world, he’s steadfast and almost aggressively plain speaking. The notion of treachery almost bewilders him.
But that doesn’t make him a wide-eyed innocent. Far from it. He’s volatile and punchy, and whilst the other officers might be constrained by the MI5 hierarchy, Jim is an outsider, free to comment on methods and modes of conduct he finds baffling.
Jim sees the world in black and white, but he will soon come to realise that in the world of espionage life is lived in a shadowy grey. MI5 is fighting to keep the Soviets at bay and the KGB doesn’t play by the rules so sometimes MI5 can’t either.
And so Jim is uneasy about being dragged into this opaque world of lies and subtleties. He believes lying demeans him. If Jim tells you the sky is green, then it’s more likely that the sky has turned mysteriously green than Jim is lying.
And it’s because of this that Daddy recruits him to the committee. After just a few minutes in their company, Jim has decided the committee members are privileged over-educated dandies, who make their living from deceit and violence.
Just being in the same room as them makes him feel grubby and contaminated. But being thrown into work with Joe, he’ll learn first-hand about the dangerous work that goes on to keep the world safe from nuclear war and maybe he’ll come to understand the complexities of this strange new world.
