Breaking the Chain

Greg Eddon wins the local leg of a national cycle race, beating his own teammate Mitch McCordell at the last minute, and ends up dead. He had barely got off the bike. The order of events matters as much as the events themselves. There is a cruelty to the timing that the episode doesn't waste. Chris Murray wrote the script with Caroline Graham, and Rob Evans directed, and they put the murder right in the middle of the sport's rituals, which makes everyone with a bike a suspect.

Barnaby and Nelson work through the team and the officials, then the families. Edward Akrout's Damien Lamerat and Hari Dhillon's Reece Dexter are the kind of men who treat racing as a business, while Sophia Di Martino's Amber Layard and Rebecca Grant's Joanna Stockerton circle the edges with their own loyalties. Richard Graham's Gerry Bleacher is the voice of the older school, and Ben Lamb's Aiden McCordell is family to the man Eddon beat, which is never a comfortable position. Manjinder Virk's Dr Kam Karimore has the unenviable job of establishing exactly what killed a man in peak condition. The team's loyalties are divided down the middle, and the division shows in every interview. The police are outsiders in this world, and the episode uses that.

The last-minute win is the whole game. It handed someone a motive in front of a crowd, and the episode is patient about showing how many people found that result inconvenient. A race has a winner and a loser, but the aftermath has a lot more than two sides. Every lap of the course gets revisited, and nobody can agree on who was where.

But it is a good, tense entry with a properly sporting murder. Even the winner's celebration looks wrong in hindsight. The finish line was never the real finish line.