Beauty Hath Strange Power

Beauty Hath Strange Power begins with the delivery problem that follows a breakthrough. Rose Stagg's disappearance is announced and a television appeal is launched to find her. Gibson, who has named Spector as the single target of the inquiry, orders extensive surveillance on the suspect and his family and settles into the wait for him to make a mistake. Two confrontations shape the hour, and both belong to the investigating team rather than to the killer.

The first is with Reed Smith. Gibson and the pathologist share an intimate moment in the jazz bar of Gibson's hotel, and Smith chooses not to take the liaison further; Gibson returns alone to her room. The second is with Jim Burns. He comes to her room drunk and distressed and tells her that he leaked information about her investigation to Morgan Monroe, which tipped off Monroe's son Aaron. He is a recovering alcoholic who has relapsed, and he and Gibson once had an affair. He tries aggressively to kiss her and she fends him off with a palm strike that bloodies his nose. While she is cleaning him up in the bathroom, Burns tells her that he was the arresting officer in a raid on a paedophile ring at a boys' home, Gortnacul, where Spector had stayed as a child, and speculates that Spector may have been abused there himself. Spector is in the room while this happens. He has broken in and watches the confrontation from hiding; he leaves while the two are in the bathroom, but not before reading Gibson's private dream journal and writing a taunting message in it. The invasion turns the case from a professional hunt into something personal.

The grooming of Katie continues. Spector sets her to work for him, destroying his clothes and providing cover, and rewards her with a sexual encounter over a video call. The investigation keeps moving in the background: Gibson personally identifies a car Spector is driving despite a changed number plate, and the surveillance tightens around the family home.

The episode's engine is the Burns confession. One scene delivers the corruption strand, the childhood-home lead and the personal breach with Gibson at the same time. Its weakness is plausibility: Spector gets into a senior officer's hotel room, reads her journal and leaves, and the audience is asked to accept it because the plot needs it. What distinguishes the record is that its reversals come from inside the investigation, from the leak and the affair and the journal, rather than from the killer. It is where the series begins to explain Spector rather than merely demonstrate him, through the Gortnacul material, and where it starts to argue that the harm he does to his own family is a kind of victimhood the genre usually ignores. Its audience, 3.01 million in the UK, was the lowest of the six episodes in the series.