Followed by giving over the computer for Lindsay to deal with, and a period of giving up and just editing an eBook for a bit instead...
Matthew Needham, from the Advent Chronicles.
I feel like if I draw enough of the damn characters I might stop faffing and sort out the plot holes. Hahaha. That’ll happen.
Matthew is a WW1 veteran and former barrow boy. He works as Maddy's "secereteray" (his spelling is ... inventive), and his best friends who are not his boss are probably either a police surgeon and closet socialist who provides abortions on the side, or a variety of call girls, the most prominent of whom is a brash dreamer called Fleur. MORE ABOUT FLEUR LATER.
He has a pleasant enough soul but it's full of dents, dinks, and things he doesn't want to talk about. Matthew is very much a rotter made, or making good, as best he can, but he's uncomfortable around people who wear their goodness on their sleeve, and he gravitates toward the underworld or the law - which are, as he says, pretty close.