Dead End

A children's entertainer, Lofty Parker is discovered dead in an alley, and the case is a small, sad puzzle. Parker was lifting jewellery from the houses where he entertained, and the ring found on his body leads Frost to Joan Atkins, whose husband — discovering his wife's rings missing — confronted Parker, struck him, and took back the wrong jewellery. An old head injury made the blow fatal. A burglary, a confrontation, a death: Denton's most ordinary murder.

The second case is the episode's engine, and it brings Frost's past back to haunt him in the form of DS Annie Marsh — the officer who reported him for neglecting his duty years earlier, after he pursued a knife-wielding suspect without backup and an officer was injured. Frost was cleared, but the incident stalled his career. Now they are partners, and the distrust between them is a wall.

The case: Mark Harrison, the lorry driver who wiped out four people, three of them Heals, has had his conviction overturned on appeal — the crash blamed on a mechanical fault — and is back behind the wheel of a local bus, the very picture of unpunished evil. When Harrison and his conductress are abducted, the town holds its breath. The conductress is released when the abductors learn she is diabetic; the trail leads to the Heals' youngest son and Robert Trusham, whose wife was the fourth victim. Trusham tortures Harrison into admitting the accident happened because he was distracted by his phone, then stages a hanging engineered to kill him — using the unwitting Toolan's elevator trip to do it. Frost, who has risked his life to save Harrison, watches the man die anyway, and Trusham, delighted, turns himself in.

The episode's last word belongs to Marsh. with the case closed, Frost credits her work; she warns him that his rule-bending will be his undoing — and the series, nearing its end, lets the warning hang. Dead End, written by David Gilman and directed by Roger Bamford, is a study in dead ends: the lorry driver whose appeal is a dead end for justice, the detective whose methods have finally met their match in a partner who will not forgive them, and a title that names the episode's true subject — the place Frost is heading.

A study in dead ends, pairing a loathsome villain who escapes justice with a partner who will not forgive Frost's methods. The title names the episode's true subject. A study in dead ends, and the price of methods.