Deadly Intent: Part 3

Julia Larson confesses. She had known that her husband, the man she called Anthony Collingwood and who was in truth the global drug smuggler Alexander Fitzpatrick, was caught up in murky dealings when he left for Mexico a year earlier, and she says he persuaded her to marry Frank Brandon to deflect suspicion from her association with him. She claims she did not know the scale of his criminality. Her accountant, David Rushton, had looked after the account holding Fitzpatrick's ill-gotten gains, and was killed because he meant to decamp with them. Julia is herself killed soon after Langton releases her.

A fraud squad inspector visits Langton, and the visitor proves to be Fitzpatrick in disguise, hunting the whereabouts of a man the summaries call Julius, who had taken the drug Drop Dead after finding it in Danny's car. Fitzpatrick retrieves his haul after killing that man's wife. The decisive clue is a matter of science. DNA recovered at the crack den matches DNA found at Helga's farmhouse, and Helga finally admits she sheltered Fitzpatrick when he came back to England after the operation in Mexico. She had been his lover before he met Julia, and still loves him. She agrees to tell Langton where he is.

The trail leads to an arrest at St Pancras station and a chase at a private air strip. The published accounts stop there. They do not state whether Fitzpatrick is captured, charged or killed after the pursuit, so his fate is left open. What the sources do establish is that the killings and the smuggling operation trace back to him, the international trafficker played by Richard Brake and credited as both Marshall and Fitzpatrick. The man behind the case is named; what becomes of him is not.

The part's strength is the DNA match, which turns a remote and apparently uninvolved sister into the clue that breaks the case; it is the point at which the scattered strands meet, and it is the only series three part in which Langton is directly deceived by his quarry. Its weakness is that the resolution runs on two large contrivances, a disguise that deceives the lead investigator and a suspect who has had his face changed, and the fate of the man is left unclear, an ending the mysteryfile reviewer called downbeat.

It is the closing part of the series the contemporary press judged the best of the four. The Guardian's column held that for once the concluding episode did not collapse under the demands of an implausible climax, singled out the Danish sisters, and called the friction between Travis and Langton an unusual and intriguing premise on which to plot a TV love affair, just as long as it does not happen; The Times, which had savaged the show in earlier years, allowed that it had grown into something worth watching. The mysteryfile reviewer took the opposite view, finding the whole thing quite watchable but also quite risible. Series three ends the programme's run of women-murdered-by-a-serial-killer stories and, with it, the tidy reveal of the first two runs.