Simisola: Part Three

The final part of the story belongs to the unidentified dead girl, and Wexford has to work without his best witness, who is still comatose in hospital. Left with deduction instead of testimony, he pieces together the victim's life before her death and reaches a grim conclusion: she was an abused servant. The truth, he decides, is hiding in the polished homes of the well-to-do, behind the kind of respectable doors that never open onto the police.

The investigation moves through those houses with a detective's careful tread. Michael Cochrane's Swithun Riding, Jane Lapotaire's Anouk Khoori, George Harris' Dr Raymond Akande and Ellen Thomas' Laurette Akande, Marcia Tucker's Oni Johnson and a young Idris Elba as Raffy all orbit the enquiry, with Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden, Robin Kermode's Sgt Vine and Louie Ramsay's Dora in support. Alan Plater and Ruth Rendell shared the writing, and Jim Goddard directed. The trilogy's final chapter aired on 9 February 1996, and it is the hour in which Wexford's enquiry moves most fully out of the station and into the drawing rooms of the rich.

The episode is Wexford peeling back the layers of respectable society to find something far more complicated beneath, and it is the case's emotional centre. A girl who served, who was abused, who died unidentified: the tragedy of Simisola is that she was invisible to almost everyone who might have helped her, and the title, which means something close to 'rest in peace' in Yoruba, carries the whole weight of that.

The resolution ties the dead girl to the wider case with the terrible clarity the story has been building toward. Melanie's fate and the servant's fate were never separate, and Wexford's slow, angry discovery of that connection is the hour's real subject. The comatose witness wakes to a case already solved, and the viewer is left with the uncomfortable knowledge that justice arrived late, as it so often does.