Heartstones: Part Two

The conclusion of the Heartstones story picks up where part one left off, with the Crossland household rearranged and smouldering. Sixteen-year-old Elvira is incensed: her father brought a new woman home shortly after her mother's death, and the betrayal feels total. The raw wound of it curdles into something worse. Elvira swears revenge, and the episode follows the consequences of that oath through the family and the wider academic circle around them.

The story stays intimate even as it gathers characters. Emily Mortimer's Elvira is the engine, her grief and fury indistinguishable from each other, and Daisy Haggard's Spinny provides the counterweight, the sister who eats and worries and sees things that are not there. Anthony Andrews' Luke carries the burden of being the father who moved on too soon, and the supporting cast of Lizzie Mickery's Dr Anna Sayles, Anthony Higginson's Professor Walsh, Leon Lissek's Professor Cyprian, Ursula Mohan's Mrs Cyprian, Gresby Nash's Daniel, Alan MacNaughtan's Dean and Jeannie Crowther's Rosemary keeps the manse populated with witnesses.

Guy Meredith and Ruth Rendell shared the writing, and Piers Haggard directed. The story is one of the series' standalone adaptations, trading Kingsmarkham for the enclosed world of the college, and it was first shown on 8 January 1996. The result is an exercise in emotional restraint, the kind of story where the worst violence happens in a teenage girl's intentions and the quiet spaces of a stone house. There is no chase, no forensics, only the slow accumulation of a family's unresolved sorrow.

The ending does not let anyone off the hook. Elvira's revenge, whatever form it takes, grows out of the grief that nobody in the house would name, and the episode closes with the damage laid out and the family left to live with it. Heartstones is the sort of Rendell adaptation that lingers, because it understands that the most frightening thing in a house is often the person who loves the most.