Vanity Dies Hard: Part Two

Alice's marriage plans are in turmoil, and the turmoil has a name: Nesta Drage, the best friend who opposed the wedding and then vanished. Everyone tells Alice there is nothing to worry about. She disregards the assurances, and the investigation she conducts on her own starts uncovering evidence of foul play sitting just beneath the surface of local life.

The trail leads her to Nesta's mail and a seedy hotel in Brighton, where the story goes strange: Nesta has been and gone, and a man called 'Mr Drage' took her belongings. Alice is unconvinced, and Andrew is annoyed by her obsession, though they patch things up long enough to attend the opening of the new by-pass together. Further revelations about Nesta's hasty departure convince Alice that her friend was murdered. Then she goes down with a virus, and the question changes from what happened to Nesta to who is coming for her next.

The episode tightens around Alice like a slow screw. She is unhappy about the whispered conversations between Andrew and the Polish au pair, Pernille Madsen, and unhappier still when she learns the au pair is in possession of a letter from Nesta postmarked 'Orphington'. Every thread leads somewhere, and nowhere good. Eleanor David's Alice is a woman being gaslit by her own household, Mark Frankel's Andrew is all charm and concealment, and Joanna Kanska's Pernille sits at the centre of the mystery without explaining herself. The wider circle is filled out by Leslie Phillips' Justin Whittaker, Leonard Preston's Hugo and Melanie Kilburn's Jackie, with Peter Egan's Harry Blunden and Patricia Samuels' Lady Minister among them.

Julian Bond and Ruth Rendell wrote it, and Alan Grint directed. The hour is a study in the slow tightening of suspicion, the kind that feels less like action and more like the walls closing in. Alice believes Nesta has been harmed, and she is determined to find out more, and the audience is right behind her.