Silent Scream: Part 2

The Delany case keeps opening. The police interview Amanda's three actor lovers, and two of them, Scott Myers and Sean O'Dell, admit to a threesome with her, after which Sean owns to having lost his crucifix. That detail matters, because a crucifix was found on the floor of Amanda's mews house, and another was found by the body of Dan Hutchins, a former college friend of Amanda's whose death was put down to a drug overdose. Amanda's stuffed toy rabbit, in which she kept her drugs, has also vanished.

The crucifix by Dan's body changes the shape of the inquiry. The police had treated his death as accidental and self-inflicted, but the two women he once shared a squat with clearly have something to hide, and a death recorded as an accident becomes a possible murder. The part runs on that re-reading, and on a string of interviews in which suspects arrive and rule themselves out after a short conversation. The people closest to Amanda are the ones with something to hide, and the deaths of her old flatmates turn the investigation inward.

After talking to Josh Lyons, the publisher who was to bring out Amanda's scandalous memoir, Anna convinces Langton that she was not the one who ruined his promotion chances. The police also pull in Helena Mitchell, the wife of one of Amanda's lovers, who went to Amanda to ask her to end the affair and left while she was still alive, and who reports having seen a man at the flat. The wives of the other lovers widen the pool of those with reason to resent her. Then a third body is found: Felicity Turner, another of the former flatmates, is taken from the river. No culprit is named, and the two deaths among Amanda's old friends are still being worked when the part ends.

The strength is the turn on Dan's death, which unlocks the pattern behind the killings and gives a middle part a genuine reversal rather than another interview. The weakness is everything else about its position. It is a middle part by construction, suspects arrive and are dismissed, and nothing is resolved, so it depends wholly on the finale for its meaning. The audience fell away from the middle instalment, which drew the smallest of the three parts at 6.32 million, and a DVD retrospective judged the series polished and consistently engaging but nothing out of the ordinary.

What it does carry is the clearest test the series gives its own leads. Langton accuses Anna of being the one who cost him his command, and the confrontation is played as the emotional peak of the hour, a scene the reviews remembered. The command intrigue, who informed on Langton, runs alongside the murder in a way the programme had not attempted before, with the team hunting the dealer even as Langton runs his own inquiry into his betrayer, and the interviews, especially those in the room with Kate O'Flynn's Jeanie Bale, are where the story's real work is done.