Second Time Around

Second Time Around, written by Daniel Boyle and directed by Adrian Shergold, opens the fifth series by raking over an old case that has never left Morse alone. Charlie Hillian, a retiring and newly honoured Deputy Assistant Commissioner, dies on the very evening of his celebration after a break-in at his Oxfordshire home. DCI Patrick Dawson, an old colleague of Morse's and the officer who originally worked the unsolved matter, is keen to help — a partnership Morse enters with characteristic wariness, since the two men have never much liked one another.

The thread that pulls Morse in is a book Hillian was writing about his old cases, assisted by the eccentric writer Walter Majors. One set of notes has gone missing: those concerning the unsolved murder of a child, Mary Lapsley, whose body Morse himself discovered years before. That the chapter should vanish now suggests someone has nursed a grievance across decades, and the investigation circles the people who had reason to keep the truth buried. Sam Kelly's Majors and Christopher Eccleston's Terrence Mitchell give the supporting cast a charged, nervous energy, while Kenneth Colley's Dawson embodies the older policing Morse both respects and resists.

Shergold directs with a patient, autumnal calm, the rural house and the retirement honours lending the violence a particular poignancy. The episode is as much about professional memory as about murder: Hillian's book was to be a reckoning, and his death an attempt to stop it. Morse, who has carried the Lapsley case in his head for years, finds the personal and the official finally converge, and the resolution honours the series' habit of letting the past do the killing. It is a sombre, elegiac hour, and one of the clearest statements of what Morse is actually pursuing when he refuses to let a file stay closed. The missing chapter is the key: Hillian and Dawson never solved the Lapsley killing, and someone has decided the book must not tell the world why. Morse's pursuit of the old file runs alongside the new murder, and the two turn out to share a culprit who has waited years for the right moment. Oliver Ford Davies's Redpath and the other figures from Hillian's past give the inquiry a gallery of the respectable and the resentful, and the rural setting — all orchards and quiet lanes — makes the violence feel like a violation of the peace rather than a break in it. By the end the book is finished in a way its author never intended, and Morse closes a case that had been quietly stalking him since long before the OBE was minted. Hillian's honour, conferred at the palace, is finally answered by a truth extracted at the scene, and Morse, who distrusts ceremony, finds he does not mind this particular ending.