The Harrowing (2)

The murders take a turn for the literary. A student is stung to death by bees. A dying woman is overdosed on morphine. Two female lovers are found hooked together like meat on a rail. Red, sifting the deaths, spots what the killer is doing: arranging each killing to mirror the Inferno. It's a pattern with a definite shape, which means there's an ending, and the killer is heading for it. The episode knows exactly how grotesque its own imagery is, and it doesn't flinch.

Not everyone agrees on the reading. DI Jack Price is convinced that Isabel was murdered, and when he pushes the point he is suspended for his trouble. He's right, or at least right about something. And watching the force discipline him for it leaves a sour taste, because the team needs every pair of hands it can get. Isabel, whoever she is, keeps surfacing in the margins of the case, and Price's suspension doesn't make her go away.

Meanwhile the race itself continues, Red and his people trying to get ahead of a killer whose motives refuse to come into focus. That's the unsettling trick of this middle part. You can read the pattern in the deaths well enough. The person laying them out stays invisible, and that is worse than any single killing. The team is effectively guessing, and they know it. Guessing costs time, and time costs lives.

Terry Cafolla and Boris Starling wrote it, Paul Unwin directed. The familiar faces return: Ken Stott's Red, Neil Dudgeon's Warren, Maxine Peake's Vickie Clarke, Helen McCrory's Rachel Price. Hugo Speer, Harriet Walter, Adam Kotz, Beatie Edney, Margot Leicester and Eamon Boland fill out the college and the family trees.

The bodies are arranged with a kind of care that feels like mockery. The pattern is there for anyone to read; the person making it is not.