Mind Games

A man freed on licence after serving twenty years for killing a fourteen-year-old girl comes back to his home village, and the past rises with him. Carl Meyer did his time for killing Jane Crewes, but the disappearance of her cousin Harriet was never solved — and when a housing development digs up Harriet's remains, Frost, called in to investigate the old case, slowly comes to believe what he was never supposed to believe: that Carl may be innocent.

The episode opens with a farce that turns deadly. Two motivational speakers are tricked by their lovers into stripping for a midnight swim; the women run off with their clothes, and one of the men — Roman Cassell — goes back back back back to his office and is found beaten to death the next morning. Suspicion falls on a millionaire and his father-in-law, who blame Cassell for the death of the millionaire's wife after her Olympic dreams were destroyed by illegal steroids. Frost exonerates them — the lack of blood at the scene proves it — and finds the real killer in one of the prank's instigators, Babs Sellwood, a woman who snapped when Cassell mocked her and threatened to brand her a slut in front of her children.

The old case is the heart of it. Carl Meyer, played by Jonathan Slinger with a quietness that could be innocence or cunning, is hounded by the villagers, especially Jane's surviving father David and her aunt and uncle, Gloria and Charlie. Forensics show Harriet was drowned in the river and re-buried after Carl was jailed — a fact that cannot be true if Carl killed her. The truth, when it comes, is unspeakable: David Crewes was assaulting his niece Harriet and murdered her to protect the secret; Jane witnessed it and died for it. Carl simply found Jane's body first and was convicted for it. Confronted at Jane's grave, David kills himself. Frost drinks over his regrets — if he had asked more questions, if he had not got so close to the families, Carl might have been spared twenty years. Mullett's comfort is cold: they must remember their mistakes to avoid repeating them.

Mind Games, written by Michael Russell and directed by Paul Harrison, is the series' great late meditation on guilt and certainty — a man convicted on a story the village wanted to believe, and a detective who has to unlearn his own confidence. Keith Barron's David, respectable to the last, is the most quietly monstrous villain the show ever produced.

The series' great meditation on certainty — a man convicted on a story the village wanted to believe, and a detective who must unlearn his own confidence. Keith Barron is quietly monstrous.