Insolence & Wine

The investigation is formally constituted, and given a name. Gibson assembles the inquiry that now has one, Operation Musicman, and tells her officers they are hunting a serial killer addicted to his own crimes. She gives them the beginnings of a working profile: the victims are of a type, chosen rather than taken by chance, and the man they are looking for will be outwardly ordinary. Impressed by Ferrington's honesty at the Sarah Kay scene, she asks the constable to work as her right hand, moving her off uniformed duty and onto the team.

Burns confirms that the officer killed outside his home was DS James Olson, a married man. Gibson tells Burns that she had slept with Olson and had not known he was married, and Burns advises her to carry a firearm. The killing also worries DI Rob Breedlove, who runs a brothel in which the murdered architect's widower, Aaron Monroe, has an interest, and who now has a dead policeman's attention on that business.

Gibson gives a press conference announcing that the three killings are linked. Ned Callan uses the event to embarrass her, and the episode turns on her refusal of the word 'innocent' for the victims: once the press is allowed to divide women into the deserving and the undeserving, she argues, the next victim will be blamed for her own death. During the conference a button on her blouse comes undone, and the episode allows the moment its discomfort. Spector's home life continues alongside. He takes Sally Ann and the children to visit his in-laws, where his mother-in-law grows suspicious about a necklace he has given Olivia, the one he took from Sarah Kay. Olivia tells her mother she has seen a scrapbook in which her father keeps a record of his crimes. Watching television, Spector sees Gibson at the press conference and recognises her as the person hunting him, and by the end of the episode he has chosen his next target, Annie Brawley, billed in some listings as a solicitor and in others as an accountant, a disagreement the sources leave open.

The strength is Gibson's refusal of the word innocent, which turns a press conference into the series' plainest statement about how victims get talked about. The weakness is the show's own overstatement: the Guardian's columnist read the unbuttoned blouse as the series sexualising its detective even as it attacks the sexualisation of victims, and the profile is delivered as assertion rather than deduction. The procedural material is deliberately thin on forensics and thick on personality, and the investigation again advances by Gibson's reading of character rather than by evidence.

It is the record where the institutional machinery of the case appears and where a junior officer is promoted on the strength of a confession rather than a success. It also stages the first meeting of the two leads, however obliquely: Spector sees Gibson only on a television screen, and she does not yet know he exists. Its audience of 3.96 million on BBC Two was the lowest of the first series in the BARB table.