Project Aphrodite: Part 2

The second part works through the threats around the case and ends with the research at the centre of it. The BBC's episode guide lists the material the police are handling in this part as a threatening e-mail from Declan to Fran Cunningham, an attack on the student Sam Wiseman, the Roaches' home being set on fire, and further deaths. Ranged against each other, those incidents describe a campaign of intimidation against everyone connected with the project, which is what the animal rights story was supposed to be.

The case turns when Fran Cunningham is killed. She is pushed from a balcony on the eighth floor of the university building into the common room during the working day. A senior academic murdered inside her own institution, after supplying the police with an account of her research that she had already contradicted once, changes the question from who was threatening the department to whose work could not survive examination. Pascoe has the research analysed by a former partner of his, and the analysis finds that Cunningham was a fraud. Whatever Project Aphrodite was supposed to be, the work behind it did not do what she said it did. The BBC's own summary of the two-part story closes the case on a lethal cocktail of power, money and jealousy beneath the glossy veneer of the cosmetics industry, and the fraud is what connects the money, the sponsor's product trial, the dead PhD student and the supervisor's own death.

No published source located in this pass states the resolution of the story, and the sources that describe the two-part story end on the question rather than the answer, with the Wikipedia synopsis finishing on the words who is responsible. One television death listing records that Fran Cunningham was thrown from a staircase by Layla Jadwin, which is a reported claim from a single source rather than a verified account, and no identification of the person responsible is asserted here beyond that.

The story is the fourth of Series 12 and the second night of the Project Aphrodite case. Its construction is the one the series uses throughout its final run, with the first night establishing a political motive that turns out to be a cover and the second night replacing it with a commercial one. The cosmetics trial is the setting that ties the two halves together, because the cream is the product of the research and the research is the reason three people connected with it are dead.

The fraud is the detail that makes the case cohere, since the supervisor's account of her work did not hold and the people who died were the ones who knew it. The episode is also one of the few in the run in which the solution comes from an outsider's analysis of documents rather than from police work, with Pascoe's former partner brought in to examine the research and returning the finding that ends the case.