The Moonlight Girls

The second series closes with "The Moonlight Girls", the darkest hour of its run. A Belgian girl, Simone Decourd, arrives in Jersey for a job at a local stable — working with horses, learning English, and, it turns out, being recruited into a profitable call-girl operation run out of a bankers' convention party. When her body is found being dragged along the beach by a horse, Bergerac has to unpick the respectable surface — the stable owner Bryony Green, the catering, the photography — to reach the trade underneath.

Bob Baker, who wrote the farcical Unlucky Dip in the first series, here handles a subject with no comedy in it, and the shift is deliberate: the dead girl's employer is hiding her real business, and everyone who worked the party has a reason to keep quiet. Debbie Farrington plays Simone with a quiet, unassuming quality that makes the exploitation at the centre of the story land harder. Caroline Blakiston and Cheryl Hall fill out the women's world, and Michael Rolfe directs with a plain seriousness suited to the material.

The investigation is a slow unwinding of false identities: the stable, the party, the photographs that show Simone in an expensive black dress she could never have afforded. Bergerac moves from the girl's employers to the men who used her, and the episode keeps the focus on the operation and the people trapped inside it rather than on the clients. It is the kind of story that would become the series' stock-in-trade — a respectable front, a hidden trade, a dead woman who was never quite who the island thought she was.

As a season finale it is sombre rather than celebratory. It does not tie the year together with a grand set-piece but closes on a note of exploitation uncovered and a death explained, which is exactly the register the second series had earned. The ending is unglamorous and a little cold, and that is the point. A grim, competent closer that shows Bergerac could end a run on the reality of the island's moneyed edges — and a strong finish to a year that had grown darker as it went.