To Be a Somebody (2)

The police stop looking for a hood and start looking for an ordinary man gone wrong, and that is when the case turns. Albie is not killing randomly. He is counting. The counting gives Albie's violence a terrible order. The number he is working towards is the same as the number of people who died at Hillsborough, and he has a freelance female reporter in his sights next. The killer being a decent man who snapped is harder for the police to accept than any hoodlum, and the episode plays on that discomfort.

Beck stumbles across Albie in the man's own neighbourhood and makes a misjudgement that costs everyone everything. Albie plays him, and the deception leaves the way open for Albie to lure Billborough into a trap and stab him to death. In his last moments, Billborough gives his colleagues the one thing that matters: the name of his killer. And the trap is simple and devastating, landing with almost no warning. The misjudgement is one of those moments where the show makes you watch a mistake happen in real time.

The episode is built around Eccleston's Billborough, and his exit is the kind of television that stays with you. The episode is an elegy disguised as a manhunt. McGovern wrote it and Fywell directed it, and the squad's grief is handled without sentimentality. Penhaligon, Harriman, the Chief Superintendent, all of them have to keep working with a hole in the middle of the team. Beth Goddard's Clare Moody is the reporter Albie has chosen, and the threat to her keeps the countdown visible. Kim Vithana's Razia Ali and Elaine Heywood's Mrs Ali keep the earlier killing in view, because Albie's first victim is not allowed to become a footnote.

Albie is not done counting. The question of who stops him is now Fitz's problem.