Thanks for Everything

"Thanks for Everything" is a story about a man who lived two lives and left one of them to burn. It opens in France, with a man driving a body to a pyre, burning it beyond recognition, and deliberately leaving a partly burned identity paper near the ashes. The man is Peter Hughes, a Jersey financier; the body is Jean Pichet, a French husband; and Bergerac, working the missing-persons case on one side of the water and Inspector Dupont on the other, slowly realises they are the same man. Hughes, it emerges, was a con artist who emptied the offshore accounts and shell companies he managed — two million pounds — and vanished, leaving his Jersey wife Mary and, unknown to her, a French wife Genevieve and two children in Picardy.

Nick McCarty's script, directed by Richard Bramall, is a study in the collateral damage of a clever man. Mary Hughes, played with brittle fury, refuses to believe her husband will not come crawling back; Genevieve, who knew Pichet as an art student in Paris, will not believe he is a killer. The burned body, identified by fingerprints, is neither man but Pierre Moulins — Genevieve's stepbrother, a blackmailer who lived off her and her mother, and who was threatening to expose Pichet's double life and the illegitimacy of his children. It was Genevieve who hit him, accidentally killing him; Pichet who staged the pyre to divert suspicion; and Pichet who has now left her behind with a note and one of the genuine paintings.

The investigation is a fine piece of cross-Channel police work — Dupont, played with gruff charm, and Bergerac trading facts across the water — but the episode's heart is in the two women. Caroline Langrishe's Mary, who learns she has nothing, is allowed real pain; the wife in France, told her husband is a bigamist and a murderer, folds it away into a quiet dignity the series does not cheapen. The paintings, replaced with fakes, are the metaphor: everything Hughes owned was counterfeit.

The title lands as a sour joke. The note Pichet leaves Genevieve reads "Thanks for everything" — the last courtesy of a man who never meant to be caught. A melancholy, well-made hour that shows the fifth series could do a quiet human tragedy as well as a virus or a siege.