The Promise (2)

Susan forgives Red for the affair, which is more than the hospital is prepared to offer anyone. The place has stopped being a refuge. The death count keeps climbing, and each one is a message the team can't quite read. Sal Meti, Red's principal suspect, had a grudge against Tierney and dies in the ward; his wife follows, arranged to look like suicide. But the violence doesn't stop there. Ian Fleet, Kate's adoptive father, is murdered too. Kate never had an easy relationship with him, and the grief lands on top of an already heavy load.

The team had assumed the victims were all connected through the prison. Red turns that over and decides the real link is Kate. She had public rows with these people, difficult dealings, a history of friction that anyone could have watched from outside. Someone, he reasons, is settling scores on her behalf, avenging wrongs done against her in public life. It's a strange theory and a frightening one, because it makes Kate the centre of a killer's attention without her consent. She is being plagued by visions she can't decipher, and the episode lets them build.

So Red does something reckless and deliberate at once. He has Kate arrested, and puts himself forward as the next likely target, bait to drag the killer into the open. Whether Kate understands the plan is another matter. It is not a plan that comforts anyone watching.

Boris Starling and Lizzie Mickery wrote it, David Drury directed. Leo Bill, Liam Cunningham and Michael Bertenshaw return, with Jimmy Flint, Philip Wright, Andrew Pleavin, Anthony Lennon, Rufus Jones and Olivia Busby, and Clare Holman's Jaine Ellis still circling the wreckage of Red's personal life.

It's a story about people carrying the past into a place that was supposed to heal them. The hospital doesn't heal anyone. It just collects the wounded.