Episode 2

AC-12 suspects a cover-up. An officer on Jo Davidson's team appears to have sabotaged the inquiry into Gail Vella's murder, and the unit opens an official investigation into Jo and Operation Lighthouse. Steve and Chloe dig into Vella's controversial reporting career for clues, and the trail leads back to previous AC-12 cases. Then the investigation takes a shocking turn: it starts to focus on Jo's personal life. The sabotage is the kind of detail that turns a mistake into a conspiracy, and the team treats it accordingly.

The episode is a reminder that the series' favourite terrain is the point where the professional and the personal collide. Vella's journalism made her enemies, and the team has to work out which of them mattered enough to kill her. The links to earlier AC-12 cases give the story a depth that pays off for long-time viewers. But the shift towards Jo's private life opens a door the show will spend the season walking through. The cover-up is real, and the sabotage is real, and the suspicion is spreading. Every file they open on Vella leads somewhere else, and the somewhere else is always a police building.

Jed Mercurio wrote it, Daniel Nettheim directed. Kelly Macdonald keeps Jo compellingly opaque, and Martin Compston's Arnott and Shalom Brune-Franklin's Bishop make a good new pairing. Vicky McClure's Fleming, Adrian Dunbar's Hastings, Anneika Rose's Jatri, Perry Fitzpatrick's Lomax, Nigel Boyle's Buckells, Owen Teale's Osborne and Andi Osho's Vella complete the cast. It is a cast that settles into its rhythm quickly, and the show is in no rush.

The episode does the difficult thing of making a dead journalist feel present. Vella's reporting is the reason she is dead, and the investigation keeps returning to her work. The team is going to find out what Jo is protecting, one way or another. But the questions are getting more personal by the hour, and the answers will be too. The cover-up has a builder, and the builder is closer than they think.