Means of Evil: Part Two

Part two splits the partnership down the middle, and the disagreement is about Hannah Kingman. Mike Burden is convinced she was killed. Reg Wexford thinks she took her own life. Neither man will shift, and so the two of them stop working the same case and start working two different ones, each following his own theory with the other's conclusions firmly filed under wrong.

It is a lovely structural idea, and the episode makes the most of it. Two detectives, one death, two investigations running in parallel, and the viewer gets to watch the evidence split along the fault line of their disagreement. Everything Hannah's death left behind means one thing to Burden and another to Wexford, and the hour is a plain-spoken demonstration of how much interpretation matters in police work. The reader's only job is to decide which man is fooling himself. There is a quiet change behind the camera too: the first part was written by Peter Berry and directed by Sarah Hellings, while this conclusion came from Ruth Rendell herself under Sandy Johnson. The two halves sit together so easily that the change is easy to miss, and that ease is exactly what a good two-parter needs.

George Baker and Christopher Ravenscroft play the standoff beautifully, two professionals too stubborn to meet in the middle. Around them, the case's faces return: Patrick Malahide's Axel Kingman, Wendy Morgan's Hannah Kingman, Cheryl Campbell's Corrine Last, John Burgess' Dr Len Crocker, Louie Ramsay's Dora, Diane Keen's Jenny, and new arrivals Gerard Horan's John Hood and Michael Hadley's Amyas Ireland. Ruth Rendell wrote the script, and Sandy Johnson directed, for broadcast on the 1st of December 1991.

The episode ends with the disagreement unresolved and both detectives still certain, which is the right note for a middle chapter. Somebody is wrong about Hannah Kingman, and the final reckoning will be uncomfortable for at least one of them. The question is whether the truth, when it arrives, will look more like murder or more like despair.