No More Dying Then: Part Two

Part two splits the story down the middle, and both halves are quietly painful. Burden, still raw from his own family's loss, takes on the job of consoling Celia Lawrence, the mother of the missing boy, which is a job nobody should have to do with a head full of fresh grief. Wexford, meanwhile, has fixed on Ivor Fairfax Swan, convinced that the same man is behind the kidnapping of little John and the disappearance of Stella Rivers all those years ago.

The noose tightens around Swan, and the hour is a study in obsession working as intended and then working too well. Wexford is so busy building the old case against Swan that he starts to lose sight of the immediate one. John Lawrence is still out there somewhere, presumably alive, and the man chasing his kidnapper seems at times to have forgotten that the point of the exercise is to find the boy and find him in time. It is Rendell territory, the moment where a detective's greatest strength bends into his blind spot.

Celia Gregory's Gemma Lawrence anchors the human cost, while Simon Shepherd's Swan sits at the centre of the suspicion with Marion Bailey's Ros Swan beside him. George Baker and Christopher Ravenscroft do the heavy lifting, and the supporting team of Ken Kitson's D.S. Martin, Louie Ramsay's Dora, Noah Huntley and Emma Smith as the Burdens' children, and Susan Bovell's WPC Johnson keep the machinery turning. Ruth Rendell wrote the script, and Jan Sargent directed.

The episode is about attention, and where it gets misdirected. Two children, two cases, one detective convinced he can close both with a single arrest. Watching the obsession take hold is uncomfortable in the best way, because the viewer can see exactly what Wexford cannot: that the clock on John Lawrence is still running while he chases the past.