Cradle

Helen Bartlett turns up at Janet's house with a story from thirty years ago. As a little girl she helped bury her brother Michael, killed by accident by their father Joe and buried in the family cellar. Janet has history with the Bevans by now, but this is a new depth. When the police dig, they find two male bodies, and then more. DSI Julie Dodson is brought in to run the inquiry, and she reads Helen as victim rather than offender, which is not a view everyone shares.

Joe, on remand for killing Eunice, calls Helen a liar. Helen insists she knows nothing about the other bodies. Two witnesses complicate the picture: a man who took Helen and her sister in to protect them from their violent parents, and a former lodger of the Bevans, one of several young men they picked up and abused, who remembers Helen as less than innocent. Helen's story is being tested from both ends now, and neither test is kind.

Janet would rather not be in the middle of any of this. Her house will not sell, and Rob Masterson has been promoted to sergeant over her head. Then Helen arrives at her door at night, drunk and distressed because the press have leaked her identity. Whatever Helen is, she is now public property, and Janet is the one she came to.

Nicola Walker plays Helen with a careful ambiguity, and she is the reason the episode works. Sally Wainwright, Diane Taylor and Suranne Jones wrote it, Juliet May directed. Lesley Sharp's Janet anchors it, with Amelia Bullmore's Gill, Suranne Jones's Rachel, Judith Barker's Dorothy and the squad of Ben Batt, Danny Miller and Tony Mooney around them.

The cellar gives up its dead, and the question of who to believe just gets murkier. Some families bury their secrets. The Bevans buried people, and whatever Helen has been, the past has not finished with her yet.