The Gift of Promise

A local businesswoman is bludgeoned to death, and the first read is a blackmail plot gone wrong. The body count rises before anyone can settle on that theory, and Lewis and Hathaway start to sense something much older underneath the present-day violence. At the heart of it sits an unsolved IRA cold case, stirred back to life by a retired MI5 official who has written her best-selling memoirs.

The book opens old wounds, and the episode makes the connection explicit: the murders are the past's way of collecting a debt. Lewis and Hathaway have to trace the thread from the memoirs back through decades of silence, questioning people whose lives were bent out of shape by events they never resolved. Grace Orde, the Suskin family, Liam Cullen: everyone connected to the old case has reasons to keep the past buried, and the detectives have to dig it up anyway.

But a retired spy writing for fame, reopening wounds the state preferred to forget, gives the episode its sharpest irony. The blackmail and the cold case only make sense together, and Lewis and Hathaway are left to judge decisions made long before their time.

Colin Dexter, Dusty Hughes and Stephen Churchett wrote it, and Metin Hüseyin directed. Cherie Lunghi plays Grace Orde, Lucy Boynton is Zoe Suskin, David Westhead plays Leon Suskin, Anna Chancellor takes Judith Suskin, Lorcan Cranitch plays Liam Cullen, Matt Orton is Elmo Woodeson, Charlie Roe plays Ronald Marsden and Mark Aiken takes Donald Voss. Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox carry the investigation.

The IRA material gives the episode a weight that the usual campus murders lack. These are crimes with a political history and a body count that never quite closes, and the show treats them with the seriousness they deserve. Some wounds, the episode argues, do not heal with time. They just wait.