Silent Scream: Part 3

The body of Felicity Turner is dragged from the river, and the last of Amanda Delany's college contemporaries, Jeanie Bale, is brought in. Under questioning she admits to holding Amanda's diary, which she had tried to sell to Amanda's father for five thousand pounds after a failed attempt to blackmail the agent Andrea Lesser. The diary names Lester James, the youngest of the three brothers who ran Amanda's chauffeur business, as both her lover and her pusher, and as the man Helena Mitchell saw at the flat. Jeanie also admits that Felicity went into the river accidentally during a fight, when Felicity refused to make money from the diary, and she pleads not guilty to Amanda's murder.

Anna follows her instincts away from the team and, in the course of the case, ends up in hospital because of the actions of a suspect. She then finds the piece of evidence that catches the killer and an accomplice. The case closes on CCTV, which unmasks the killer, and in the same episode Langton learns who cost him his command: the informant was Anna, the officer closest to him, a final twist the reviews treated as the hour's shock. Anna also takes a call from the district commissioner about her fast-track promotion.

Who the killer or the accomplice actually is, no source consulted for this article names. The summaries agree that CCTV unmasks him, that he had an accomplice, and that Jeanie Bale is charged with nothing beyond Felicity's accidental death while denying Amanda's murder, but not one of them identifies the culprit. The characters the resolution is built around are Lester James, named in the diary, and his brothers Harry and Tony, who ran the chauffeur firm, and the driver Harry James is billed across all three parts. On the evidence available, no source states which of them, or anyone else, is the killer, and the gap is recorded here rather than filled.

The part's strength is its double closure. The murder is resolved and the informant is unmasked, and Langton's personal betrayal matters as much as the crime, which makes this the only Above Suspicion instalment to close both its case and its command intrigue. The weakness is that the resolution is carried by a diary and a CCTV image rather than by the investigation the audience has watched, and that the killer is left so vaguely identified that the ending feels unresolved; a DVD retrospective called it another slightly unsatisfying resolution. It drew the largest audience of the three parts, 6.39 million.

It is, by accident rather than design, the last episode of the programme. ITV cancelled Above Suspicion after this run, the five later Anna Travis novels were never adapted, and this final part is the last of La Plante's own novels to reach the screen, which is why it is the recommended endpoint of the series. The DVD retrospectives were measured rather than warm, while one reviewer called it a wonderfully written and acted three weeks of television.