Witness

The cellar at the Bevans' house keeps giving up bodies. Seven young men are found there, and Joe Bevan, already on remand for his wife's murder, denies all knowledge of them. Only one, besides Michael, can be identified at first. Then the remains of Joe's own daughter Sheila turn up under his bedroom floorboards, and even he has to say something. He admits to killing the boys. He claims he knew nothing about Sheila.

Helen tells Janet that she and her sister Julie helped bury at least one body, which puts the whole family in the frame in a different way. Gill has a more immediate worry: the press are chasing Helen, and she suspects one of her own officers leaked Helen's involvement.

Rachel's personal life picks this week to collapse in public. She confesses to Sean that she should never have married him, and a devastated Sean has to hear it. A drunken Sharon reappears, which never helps anyone. But there is a grim usefulness to Rachel's chaos: her questioning of Joe finally gets results, and the case moves.

Another teenager's body is found upstairs, and Helen is left facing the possibility that her father killed both her brother and her sister. That is a lot to sit with, and the episode does not rush past it.

George Costigan plays Joe with a flat, unreadable menace, and Pippa Haywood's Dodson is a cold presence alongside Amelia Bullmore's Gill. Sally Wainwright, Diane Taylor and Suranne Jones wrote it, Juliet May directed. Suranne Jones and Lesley Sharp lead the cast, with Judy Holt, David Prosho, Kate Rutter, Danny Miller and Ben Batt in support.

The house gives up its secrets one body at a time, and the family at the centre of it shrinks to almost nothing. Nobody walks away from this one clean.