Deadly Intent: Part 2

Silas Roache admits to the shooting of Frank Brandon. He says he did it in a panic, and he denies killing Danny, whose body was found in his own car at the close of the first part. The admission answers one question and opens several others, and the middle part settles into interviews: the widow who denies what a photograph shows, the accountant who tidies a fortune and then dies, and the sister and brother-in-law who insist on their distance from all of it.

Julian D'Anton, a middle-class drop-out and drug user, has left his prints on Danny's car, but Langton judges him far too small-time to be a murderer, and D'Anton's wife Sadie is among the circle the inquiry touches. The case turns instead on a family snapshot. From a photograph, Anna identifies Julia's former husband, a man she knew as Collingwood, as an international criminal, and asks the drugs squad officer Sam Power to approach the FBI for the details of his crimes in America. Julia denies all knowledge of him, and goes on denying it after her accountant, David Rushton, is found dead.

Anna and Langton drive to a remote farm to see Julia's homely sister, Helga Nolan, and her husband Damian, an Oxford professor. The couple claim to have had little contact with Julia or either of her husbands, and the interview yields more evasion than fact. The bodies mount, Danny first and then Rushton, but the part resolves nothing. No culprit is confirmed; the pieces merely point towards the man the police are only beginning to name. The criminal money is held at a remove, kept in a private account by an accountant and fronted by a respectable Danish widow, an Oxford don and a farmhouse far from London.

The episode's engine is the photograph identification, the moment Anna turns a family picture into an international manhunt and the series acquires the FBI strand it has not carried before. It is also the point at which she steps from scene reader to the officer who names an international suspect, continuing the promotion thread the opener began. The programme's own material sells the same hook, a drug with the street name Drop Dead and a notorious criminal behind it who may be someone who no longer exists. The hour-long running time helps, giving the interviews space without any obligation to close the case.

The weakness is that it is a middle part and knows it. Much of the time goes on rule-outs, and the two deaths it advances are explained only in the following night's episode. What saves it is the sister-and-farmhouse sequence, which gives the story an emotional centre away from the estate and which The Observer's column singled out through the Danish sisters. This is also the part that contains the run's most quoted exchange, when Langton asks Anna whether there is anyone on the investigation who is not coming on to her, the scene the publicity used to sell the pair's odd and unresolved attraction. Its audience dipped from the opener, to 5.84 million, though it carries the highest user rating of the series three parts on a small sample.