The Red Dahlia: Part 2

The killer keeps communicating. Richard Reynolds is sent Louise Pennel's handbag, containing cosmetics that are long off the shelf and read as old-fashioned, a small but telling piece of profiling that points to a killer with an older frame of reference. A letter assembled from newsprint states that Louise deserved it and that another woman will die.

Anna Travis interviews a woman, Veronica Malins, who answered the same advertisement as Louise but was rejected as unsuitable for the post. The interview establishes that the advertisement was a filter for the killer's victims and not a genuine job, and it is the thread that connects the dead women to a single approach. The warning in the newsprint letter then comes true: the next victim is Louise's own flatmate, Sharon Bilkin, the young woman who had told Anna about the advertisement and the older man.

Langton presses for a veto on reporting the new murder, but the story breaks anyway. Reynolds, having had a one-night stand with Anna, has gone through her bag and used what he found to make the murder front-page news. Anna discovers the betrayal and angrily breaks with him. This is the point at which her private life and her professional duty collide, the thread the series had flagged from the start, and the episode's clearest statement that the media are participants in the case rather than observers.

The investigation's focus then shifts to a named suspect. The description given by the dead women's landlady of the man who visited Louise fits Charles Wickenham, down to an unusual ring he wears: an arrogant former army doctor, divorced, living with his three dysfunctional children and a housekeeper. He would appear, however, to have an alibi for Louise's murder. One listing instead has an anonymous phone call leading Langton to an aristocratic ex-army surgeon; the two accounts may be steps in the same sequence or two versions of one. The part ends with the suspect identified but not yet broken, and with the alibi to be tested in the concluding night.

Its strength is that the second killing lands on a character the audience has been given a reason to know. Sharon is not a statistic; she is the woman who helped the inquiry, which makes the killer's reach concrete. The suspect who emerges is also a sharper piece of class observation than the series has offered before: an aristocratic former army surgeon whose household and profession have been his protection, so that the title's idea of being above suspicion attaches to class as much as to charm.

The weakness is that the press-betrayal subplot and the rejected applicant interview are familiar devices, and this middle part is largely connective tissue between the shock of the opening and the reveal of the ending. It is the procedural grind the three-part commission allows, moving through the advertisement, the second victim and the press fallout, and the friction between Travis and Langton stays under the surface here, kept alive around the Reynolds affair. Around 7.54 million watched, holding the series' audience across its middle night, and it is where Anna Travis's private life first costs her professionally.