A New Lease of Death: Part Two

The question at the heart of part two is the one the whole story has been circling: did Wexford help convict an innocent man, and was that man then hanged? The episode refuses to answer it quickly, and instead shows what the doubt does to the people left standing. A daughter refuses to marry until her father is cleared. Her fiancé takes up the cause, and so does his father, and the two of them start pulling at the threads of the old conviction.

Wexford, for his part, declines to help. That is the sharpest detail in the hour: the man at the centre of the original case, the one person whose cooperation would mean everything, keeps his distance. He is not obstructing the enquiry so much as refusing to feed it, and the episode lets the viewer sit with the ambiguity of that. Is he protecting a verdict he believes in, or protecting himself from what the truth might do to him? Ruth Rendell's script, and it shows in every careful withholding. It first aired on the 6th of October 1991, and it introduced the central silence of the piece: Dorothy Tutin's Mrs Crilling, widow of the hanged man, watching the old case come back to life around her.

The regulars do their usual steady work. George Baker's Wexford is watchful and guarded, Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden is the loyal second, and the old case's faces keep returning: Peter Egan's Rev Henry Archery, Sharon Maughan's Imogen Ide, Denis Lill's Roger Primero, Suzanna Hamilton's Elizabeth Crilling, Dorothy Tutin's Mrs Crilling and Maggie Jones' Alice Flower, with Louie Ramsay's Dora and Diane Keen's Jenny in the domestic corners. Herbert Wise directed.

The episode understands that a miscarriage of justice is not one dramatic moment but a long, grinding process of people deciding what to believe. The daughter waits. The fiancé pushes. Wexford stays silent. And the truth about Harry Painter waits for the final part to arrive.