Sarah Trafford—Howard

Sarah Trafford—Howard is a relationship defined by an increasingly explicit struggle over responsibility: Sarah insists that Howard and the Department answer for concealed crimes, while Howard treats the truth as a problem to be managed. Their conflict becomes personal when Sarah rejects his account of institutional innocence and refuses to let his promises of restoring her life erase what was done to others.

The grievance behind the confrontation

Howard’s connection to Sarah is bound up with the desert experiment that shaped the account she later confronts him with. Soldiers were driven miles into the sands and told that hostile forces were present and that they should bring the enemy home alive. The soldiers believed the boy combatants were real opponents; in fact, they were exposed as part of a test in which the soldiers themselves were guinea pigs. When the agent went off, the air turned muzzy and the soldiers suffered prolonged, burning pain. Tommy Singleton tried to stop Michael Downey from looking at the boy soldiers, but Downey saw them melting. The episode makes Sarah’s accusation more than a dispute over official wording: the concealed operation involved children’s deaths as well as the soldiers’ suffering.

Howard tries to separate himself and his institution from the original crime. He tells Sarah that what happened to her friend was a crime and that the people responsible were punished, but he also defends secrecy as necessary work, arguing that the public does not want to know what happens in the margins of democracy. Sarah’s charge cuts through that distinction. She connects the poisoning of Dinah’s father to the later kidnapping of the four-year-old as bait, rejecting Howard’s effort to treat the events as unrelated or already settled.

Bargain, Threat, and Reversal

Howard presents Sarah with a bargain designed to make silence look like restoration. If she puts down the gun and accompanies him, he says, she can have her life back after signing official-secrets papers; he will also arrange a way through Mark Trafford’s difficulties. His language turns complicity into administrative tidying: the past can be made to seem not to have happened, provided Sarah accepts his terms. When she presses him for the alternative, he admits that he is not really offering a choice between two equally possible paths. The second path is what happens if she uses the gun and makes the Department act openly to suppress the story.

The threat widens beyond Sarah. Howard warns that, even if he is killed, the Department will remain and will make major accidents happen to the people around her: Downey, Dinah Singleton, Mark, and Wigwam, among others. He casts resistance as the reckless act that would endanger them, while presenting submission as the reasonable way to protect them. Sarah’s answer—that she ought to kill him—exposes the coercion beneath his offer: the apparent promise of a restored life depends on her accepting the institution’s power to decide whose lives may be erased.

When Sarah appears to consider his proposal, Howard steps forward, retrieves the gun she has dropped, and points it at her. He then admits that his assurance about signing papers was a lie and fires. The shot does not kill Sarah; the blast instead leaves Howard’s right arm catastrophically injured and the Shotgun twisted at his feet. The confrontation’s balance reverses: the man who had controlled the terms of the conversation is left screaming, while Sarah, though disoriented, kneels beside him and uses her belt to bind his arm. Her action does not reconcile them or excuse his deception. It makes their conflict more complicated: after he has threatened her and tried to shoot her, she still attempts to keep him alive.

The official dead and the living witnesses

The history Sarah invokes reaches beyond the desert test to the survivors’ subsequent confinement on Island off Scotland's West Coast. Michael Downey recalled that he and the others had been told, day after day, that they would soon go home; the men guarding them seemed, at first, simply to be people making sure they were all right. Only when one guard told Tommy Singleton that the survivors were supposed to have died in the helicopter crash near Cyprus did the arrangement become legible as imprisonment. The men had not merely been kept from the public: their deaths had already been announced, making their continued existence a secret the authorities could not easily release.

Downey’s account leaves the reason for their prolonged detention uncertain. He considered whether further tests were planned, whether officials expected the men to die from delayed effects, or whether the institution lacked the authority to execute members of Her Majesty’s forces without political cover. What seemed certain to him was that they would not be freed after the world had been told they were dead. Against that history, Howard’s later promise to make Sarah’s life as though nothing had happened is not a neutral offer of repair. It echoes the machinery that had already converted living witnesses into officially absent people, while Sarah’s refusal insists that the concealed past remains consequential.

The limits of Howard’s apology

Before the final confrontation, Michael Downey had shown Sarah Trafford how to use the Shotgun, demonstrating its force and explaining why a soldier would keep his distance from it. That lesson gives her a means of resistance, but the weapon is not simply a sign that she has become powerful: in the final exchange, Howard’s control of the conversation and the gun changes hands, and Sarah’s survival depends on her ability to act under pressure.

Howard tries to narrow his responsibility by calling the attacker who had tried to harm Sarah a rogue, and offers an apology while insisting that The Department cannot fairly be held accountable for his actions. Sarah shakes her head, unconvinced. The exchange exposes the difference between their accounts of institutional responsibility: Howard treats wrongdoing as an exception that can be disowned and managed, while Sarah sees it as part of the same system that concealed the desert experiment and used Dinah Singleton as bait. Her relationship with Howard is therefore not repaired by his regret; it remains a contest over whether the people who administer secrecy can separate themselves from its consequences.