Above Suspicion: Part 2

Part 2 opens with the actor Alan Daniels still the man the evidence points to and still uncharged. Langton lets Anna Travis spend an evening at the ballet with him, using the date to get close to the suspect and to draw him out while the case against him is assembled behind his back. The evening plays on the pull between Anna's professional task and her attraction to the man she is there to help convict, and that tension is the part's engine.

A discovery at the place where one of the victims lived gives Anna the material to set a trap. The trap, and the interview that follows, are the episode's climax. In the interview room Anna draws a confession out of Daniels, and the actor's polished public voice drops away to reveal the man beneath: a desperate boy from the north whose childhood was one of sustained abuse.

The backstory the adaptation carries from the novel is that the killer was born Anthony Duffy. His mother, Lillian Duffy, was a prostitute who ran a Manchester brothel and who abused him and allowed other men to abuse him from the age of seven. He grew up, changed his name to Alan Daniels, acquired an education and a London accent and became a successful actor. In the novel's solution his first victim was his own mother, the earliest of the unsolved killings, and a teenage Daniels was an early suspect before the case went cold. The later killings, the prostitutes and finally the student Melissa Stephens, continue the same rage, always by the same method: strangled with their own tights and their hands tied with their bras. The story ends with Daniels exposed and the case closed on Anna's evidence, and with the relationship between Anna and Langton left charged rather than settled. The exact clue that sets the trap, and a discovery at the victim's home, are not described in the available accounts.

The confession scene is what the episode is built around, and it is the reason to watch. Jason Durr has to shed the actor's charm and deliver the man underneath, and a review of the two-parter singled out the climactic interview as edge-of-the-seat stuff as Travis wheedled the confession out of him and he reverted to his former self. It is Anna's victory as much as the squad's: the rookie who was sick at the crime scenes the night before is the officer who breaks the suspect.

The weakness is that the proof is thin and the solution arrives abruptly. The commission gave the story two hours, and reviewers compared it unfavourably with Prime Suspect's slower unveiling; the reveal was said to feel rushed, with threads picked up and dropped, a commercial break was said to break the power of the key scene, and the accents on both sides were mocked as a battle of the accents. It remains the point at which Reilly's Travis proves herself and the series sets out its version of a killer with a motive rather than an appetite, a darker and more specific reveal than the genre usually allowed. Around 7.30 million watched, up on the opener, and the drama again won its 9pm slot.