Kissing the Gunner's Daughter: Part Three

The case takes a personal turn in part three, and the personal is exactly where it hurts. Wexford has taken a deep interest in Daisy's welfare, the teenage survivor of Tancred House, and his concern is no longer professional. He worries about her present state and her future, and the worrying has started to get in the way of his own relationships. The episode watches a good detective begin to lose his balance, and it is not comfortable viewing.

Matthew Jacobs wrote the script, and Mary McMurray directed, and the hour leans into the emotional damage the case is doing. George Baker plays Wexford's fixation with a restraint that makes it worse: the man is not collapsing, he is quietly rearranging his life around a girl he feels responsible for. Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden notices, Deborah Poplett's Sheila and Louie Ramsay's Dora feel the distance, and the investigation continues around a man who is only half in the room. The hour went out on the 29th of November 1992, the third of four weekly parts, and Wexford's private worry grows louder as the public case stalls.

The supporting cast returns in force: John Warnaby's Augustus Casey, Angela Crow's Mrs Griffin, David Jackson's Mr Griffin, James Ryland's Andy Griffin, Charles Collingwood's Restaurant Manager and Rosalind Thomas' Charge Nurse.

The episode's subject is how caring can curdle into interference. Daisy needs protecting, and Wexford is the right man to protect her, and the more he does it the more the protection starts to look like something else. The serial killer is still out there, the flowers are still unexplained, and the detective at the centre of it all is quietly drifting off his own case. The hour ends with the investigation intact and its leader not quite, which is the most worrying place a middle chapter can leave you.