These Troublesome Disguises

Ten days after the first series closed, Operation Musicman has run out of momentum. Paul Spector, the bereavement counsellor the police are hunting, is living quietly with his wife Sally Ann and their two children in a rented house by the water in Scotland. The marriage is over. Sally Ann, pregnant and convinced her husband has been sleeping with the teenage babysitter, is thinking about ending the pregnancy. In Belfast the police have no sighting of him at all.

DSU Stella Gibson forces the review back into motion. She goes to the hospital bedside of Annie Brawley, the victim who survived Spector's last attack but lost her brother Joe, and tries to help her retrieve the memory of that night. She shows her a way of managing intrusive memory, snapping a rubber band against the wrist, and says it once worked for her. The pathologist Reed Smith, a friend of Gibson's, is unsettled by scratches on the back of the dead DS James Olson, and Gibson admits without apology that she left them the night before he was killed. Smith then brings the case a witness: her university friend Rose Stagg, nearly strangled nine years earlier by a boyfriend she knew only as Peter, agrees to describe the man, and the description becomes a photofit that is circulated. The quieter work of the episode is the CCTV analysis along the route between Annie Brawley's home and George Best Belfast City Airport, which narrows the search, and the recovery of the decorating shears used to kill Joe Brawley from the water.

Spector returns to Belfast to clear up loose ends, to the delight of Katie Benedetto and the dismay of his estranged wife. He sends his daughter Olivia her returned dolls and a letter through a family game the show calls pixie post, and Olivia hides the letter where her father keeps his private things. As a counsellor he is assigned to Annie Brawley, the woman he nearly killed. On a train he falls into conversation with a blonde passenger, Lyndsey Conklin, who tells him she dyed her hair to avoid the Belfast Strangler; reading the photofit in her newspaper, he adjusts the drawing to look like himself, asks whether it resembles him, and comes away with her name and address. The episode ends at night inside Rose Stagg's house, where Spector encounters her young daughter Nancy and puts her back to bed before confronting Rose, the one witness who has put a face to the man called Peter. The sources do not describe this closing scene in the same terms as the abduction that opens the next episode, and one review describes an intruder dragging a woman from her bed, so the exact content of the final scene is not settled.

The episode's strength is the exchange between Gibson and Annie, which turns the aftermath of a killing into the real subject and gives the series its instruction to keep the victims alive without stating it. Its weakness is the train scene. A woman who has dyed her hair to avoid the Strangler sits opposite him, gives him her name and address, and does not notice that he is adjusting a photofit to look like himself; several reviewers treated this as a credibility problem in a show that otherwise trades on plausibility. What makes the opener unusual is how little chase there is in it: the investigation resumes, the killer resumes, and the only conventional engine, finding a murder weapon in water, is deliberately undramatic. It is where the series stops being a hunt and becomes a duel, the last episode with Morgan Monroe, and the first statement of the show's answer to the argument about crime drama and violence against women.