Brotherly Love (2)

The second murder is identical to the first, which means David Harvey cannot have done it, or at least not alone. Suspicion moves to his brother, Father Michael, and the police arrest him. And the arrest of a priest sends its own shockwave through the community, and the episode is careful not to make it easy. The evidence is not there, and he is released, but the damage is done inside the family. Michael starts casting around for someone else to blame and lands on Maggie, David's wife. She returns the favour: she claims Michael killed one of her children.

Fitz goes to see Father Michael and accuses him of murder to his face. It is a confrontation between two kinds of certainty, and neither man gives ground. The confrontation with the priest is the episode's best scene, two men who believe they are right and have the training to say so. Maggie, meanwhile, is pressing the police to release David, and the pressure spreads outward to the pathologist and the DNA expert, and to every officer who has to keep looking at the case. Stephen Tomlin's DNA expert and Paul Copley's pathologist do the grim science while the family tears itself apart above them.

McGovern and Battersby keep the suspicion rotating through the Harvey family like a fault line. Brid Brennan's Maggie is the quiet pole of the episode, and the more she is pushed, the more interesting she gets. Sharon Percy's Joyce Watkins and Barbara Flynn's Judith Fitzgerald hold the other corners of the story down. The episode lets Maggie's grief speak for itself, which is rare and welcome. The Harvey family is a closed system, and the episode keeps the pressure on from outside it.

Everyone in this family is pointing at someone else. Fitz is starting to look where they are not, and the third part will show what he finds.