True Confessions

Jeanette Barr, the affluent wife of a businessman, throws herself off a bridge into the river — except the autopsy says otherwise: the water in her lungs proves she had been drowned in a bathtub and then dumped. The obvious suspect is her husband James, whom Frost had investigated ten years earlier after the murder of his first wife, Harriet, by an intruder. If James killed again, then the wrong man has been in prison for Harriet's murder ever since.

The case is complicated by a priest. Father Sullivan has heard a confession from someone planning a murder — but the seal of the confessional means he cannot say who. And Frost himself is suddenly under investigation: DS Bailey from the Discipline and Complaints department is digging into fabricated evidence in old cases handled by Frost's old chief superintendent, Charlie Fairclough. Fairclough owns up to planting evidence to win convictions, including the one against Harriet's killer.

Then a retired priest delivers the key. James's brother Alec was devoutly religious as a boy, but as the family struggled he turned jealous and destructive — vandalising James's possessions, poisoning a beloved pet, stealing James's girlfriends. Frost, reinstated, uses Sullivan to trick Alec into confessing. Alec killed Jeanette because James had given her his stake in the family firm, and she meant to sell it to a rival circling the firm's assets unless Alec paid her a fortune — a blackmail laced with seduction. When Frost accuses him of killing Harriet too, out of the same jealous hatred, Alec flees into the road and is killed by a passing lorry.

True Confessions, written by Michael Russell and directed by Sandy Johnson, is a study in how institutions cover their own sins — the church with its confession, the police with its planted evidence, the family with its buried hatred. Kenneth Cope's Fairclough, a decent man who bent the law and is now being asked to account for it, gives the episode its melancholy weight, and the twist that Frost's own mentor was the one who corrupted the evidence makes the confession in the title land on everyone at once.

A dense, layered mystery about the sins institutions bury, anchored by Kenneth Cope's quietly devastated Fairclough. A dense mystery about the sins institutions bury.