Part 3

The last part pays for the first two in about fifty minutes. Brown now has the identity of the gunman and the IRA has a description of a new arrival in its areas, so the two men are hunting each other through the same streets. The IRA's answer is to work on the people Brown has been seen with, which puts Josephine Laverty and everyone else who has shared a table with Harry McEvoy in danger.

Brought back into the search, Downes ambushes Brown with two other gunmen. Brown kills both of them and forces a passing driver at gunpoint to give chase, but Downes gets away, and the effort costs Brown the last of his cover.

What follows is the sequence the serial is remembered for. Brown follows Downes to his own house, which is under British Army surveillance, and shoots him dead in the street in front of Downes's wife. The soldiers watching the house do not know who Brown is, and they shoot him as an IRA gunman. He is left in the road while the operation he was sent to carry out is completed by the army that refused to help him carry it out.

The ending finishes itself a few feet away. Mrs Downes comes out to her husband's body, finds Brown alive, takes his own revolver from him and shoots him in the head with it. Both principal characters are dead inside a minute, one killed by his own side's misreading and one killed by a widow, and the mission to prove that the IRA can be reached in its own streets has been accomplished in a way that satisfies nobody.

The serial closes with a female narrator reading lines written by the daughter of William J. Staunton, a magistrate shot dead in Belfast in 1973: don't cry, Mummy said, they're not real, but Daddy was, and he's not here. Clannad's theme plays over the closing shots of the city.

Maggie Shevlin, as Mrs Downes, has almost nothing to say in that final scene and does the decisive thing in it, and the director's own account of the production singles her out. Ray Lonnen's death is the harder performance, because there is nothing heroic in it: Brown is shot by soldiers who have no idea what he is, having just done what he was sent to do.

The weakness of the part is pace. The pursuit is compressed hard, and the route by which Brown gets to Downes's door arrives more quickly than the story has earned, which is the same complaint that attaches to the serial's plotting elsewhere. Fifty-two minutes is not much room for a manhunt and two deaths.

Where the ending does work is in its refusal to moralise. Nobody in the last scene is doing the right thing, and the only statement the production allows itself is a child's poem borrowed from a real victim's family. That closing combination, the theme music and the words of a man's daughter, is the reason the serial is still watched: the song outlived the programme by decades, and the silence it was written for is the silence this final part creates.