What Happened to Dickie Bough in Slow Horses?

By Sirjan Chetri Last updated Feb 26, 2023

Richard “Dickie” Bough is played by Phil Davis, and the younger Dickie Bough is played by Mark Stewart. Richard “Dickie” Bough only appears in the first episode of the second season of “Slow Horses,” an Apple TV+ spy thriller show based on Mick Herron’s “Slough House” novels.

His mysterious death, on the other hand, changes the storyline of the whole season. Bough was a former MI5 agent who worked closely with Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman).

When Lamb starts looking into Bough’s death, he finds that it has something to do with events at the end of the Cold War. If you want to know why Dickie Bough died, we can tell you.

What Happened to Dickie Bough in Slow Horses?

At this point in time, Dickie is an old man. At the start of season 2, he sees someone he hasn’t seen since the Berlin Wall came down in East Germany, so he starts to follow him. About forty years ago, this bald man and other KGB agents like him caught Dickie and tortured him to find out what he knew.

Even though it’s been 40 years since this happened, Dickie remembers every second of it like it was yesterday. He decides to follow the man, so he takes a bus to catch up with him. But when the last stop comes and Dickie doesn’t get off, the driver comes to check on him and finds that he is dead.

During the season, we find out that Dickie used to be one of Lamb’s “Joes,” or agents who were sent to join or join up with the enemy and send back important information. Lamb is looking into Bough’s death when he finds the word “Cicada” written on the dead man’s phone. This tells him that Dickie killed Bough.

People think that cicadas are Russian sleeper agents who are trained to blend in with British society. Their name comes from the fact that, like cicadas, they lived underground for years before it was time to “hatch.” Bough hasn’t had anything to do with the agency in decades, but Lamb is very loyal to everyone he has served with.

And his loyalty is what pushes him to keep going during the investigation. Bough was fired from the agency after he showed up to work drunk and said that Cicada agents had taken him and poured brandy down his throat while they were holding him. He wasn’t taken seriously, and in the 1980s, MI5 decided that the Cicadas didn’t exist because their leader, the clever spymaster Alexander Popov, was said to be a fake.

During his investigation, Lamb talks to Nikolai Katinsky (Rade Serbedzija), who seems to be a middle- or low-level KGB agent who defected to the UK in the 1990s and is the only Soviet defector to talk about Popov and Cicadas. He says that he heard Popov talking to a man named Andrei Chernitsky.

Lamb realizes that Chernitsky is the person who killed Bough after recognizing him from what Katinsky says about him. Katinsky turns out to be Popov in the end. When he turned to the Russian government, they let him go with one condition: he would have to help them at some point in the future.

In the present, the Russians told him to make a distraction while they went after their real target, the Russian energy oligarch and defector Ilya Nevsky, who was said to be the next leader of Russia. In return, Katinsky asked for the names of the people who killed Charles Partner, who was a former informant of Katinsky’s, the head of the First Desk at MI5, and Catherine’s former boss.

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It turns out that the two men named above are Lamb and River, Cartwright. At the end of the season, Lamb honours Dickie’s work for MI5 by putting a note on the walls of St. Leonard’s near the plaques for agents who died while doing their jobs.

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