Darkness Visible

The murder is minutes old and the episode opens on its aftermath. Spector bathes Sarah Kay's body in her own bath, paints her fingernails, cuts a lock of her hair, takes a necklace, and photographs and films the posed body; he later masturbates over the film. The lock of hair and the rest of the trophies go into a hiding place he keeps in the ceiling of his daughter Olivia's bedroom, within a few feet of his sleeping wife.

Gibson refuses to answer the journalist Ned Callan's questions about her role in the Monroe case, and he writes a piece about her arrival. That night she sleeps with DS James Olson, an encounter she takes as casual; by the following day she is angry at the article and is called out to Sarah Kay's murder scene, where she takes charge. PC Danielle Ferrington tells her the truth: after failing to reach Sarah Kay by telephone the evening following the break-in, she and her partner left the house, almost certainly leaving the woman with her attacker. Prof. Reed Smith, the pathologist, arrives and tells Gibson that Sarah Kay was a few weeks pregnant. Gibson uses the link to the two earlier deaths to press Burns, who agrees to make her the permanent Senior Investigating Officer. Olson then breaches the scene to demand to know why Gibson has ignored his messages and the pictures he sent her, and she dismisses him.

The corruption strand develops on two fronts. Morgan Monroe puts pressure on Burns to clear the name of his son Aaron in connection with the killings, and that night Olson is shot dead outside his own home, in front of his son. The shooting is presented as possibly sectarian but is not one. The earlier Shankill killing of the drug dealer Michael Lockwood appears to prompt a retaliatory murder, and the weapons stop near the Falls Road is followed up in the background. The babysitter Katie Benedetto, fifteen, comes to the house and tries to take Sarah Kay's lock of hair; Spector manhandles her to get it back, telling her it belonged to his mother, and she is not convinced.

The record ends on a killing that explains nothing. No source consulted names Olson's killer; the following episode ties the murder to the Monroe operation and to DI Rob Breedlove, and establishes why Olson was shot, but the gunman is never identified, and a viewer would have to watch the episode to publish a name. That is the episode's real weakness: the corruption strand and the killing strand are kept so separate that Olson's murder, the closing beat, resolves and explains nothing. Its strength lies in the sequence that opens it, the cut between the killer's quiet housekeeping of a murder and the detective's arrival at the same death, which is the series' method stated in a single move.

Two things about it stay in mind. The confession scene between Ferrington and Gibson gives a junior officer's mistake moral weight and turns the murder from a puzzle into a cost, and it is the reason Gibson recruits the constable in the next episode. The record is also where the PSNI's political entanglement begins, the strand that runs through the whole first series and into the second. It drew 4.16 million on BBC Two, and it introduces Morgan and Aaron Monroe and the corruption that costs Olson his life.