Men Should Weep (2)

Penhaligon is sure her attacker was not the man in custody, and the police start closing in on Floyd Malcolm instead. The closer they get, the uglier the picture becomes. And the case file starts to look less like a hunt and more like a house of cards. She finds a connection between her rapist and DS Jimmy Beck, and the discovery puts her own colleagues under a light nobody wants to switch on.

Floyd, meanwhile, keeps moving. He acts on what sounds like Fitz's advice and kills his next victim, and the audacity of it is the point. The police catch him, and then they have to let him go, because Fitz cannot make the breakthrough in time and the evidence is not there. Floyd does not disappear quietly. He phones Fitz on his radio show and asks, on air, how a rapist should cover his tracks. It is a taunt dressed up as a request for advice, and it is the most chilling thing in the episode. The radio show gives the episode its strangest weapon: a public conversation between the hunter and the hunted.

McGovern and Stewart keep the menace coiled through the whole episode. Beck's part in it hangs over every scene, and Somerville's Penhaligon carries the load of knowing more than she can prove. Marianne Jean-Baptiste's Marcia Reid and Claire Hackett's Deborah Wiley keep the wider world of the case in view. Wil Johnson's Skelton and Ricky Tomlinson's Wise keep the procedural side honest while the personal threads fray. The episode is a study in what happens when the system fails quietly.

The system has let him walk. Fitz is left holding the microphone and the rage, and the third part has a lot to answer for. The episode ends with the feeling that everyone is running out of moves.