The Perilous Edge of Battle

The Perilous Edge of Battle is where the surveillance strategy fails and the arrest is forced. Gibson continues to watch Spector, but the operation built around him is compromised from several directions at once. Burns takes the childhood thread to its source, visiting Fiachra Jensen, the disgraced paedophile priest who ran the Gortnacul boys' home where Spector was in care. Jensen denies that he abused Spector, though he speaks of the boy with a predatory fondness. Burns comes back with Spector's juvenile record, held under the name Peter Baldwin, recording breaking and entering and the theft of women's underwear from about the age of thirteen, and a journal Burns describes as a map of the places the boy watched people. One recap reports the name Baldwin; the sources consulted do not otherwise carry it, so it is recorded here as a reported detail rather than a settled one.

Spector moves to destroy his traces. He sends Katie to withdraw cash, to fix a love-lock to a bridge carrying both their names and the date, and to recover a lock of hair and a memory card from his hotel room. She is in the act of flushing the card down a toilet when the police break in and arrest her. The arrest of Spector himself is an accident of violence. A call comes in about a man matching the suspect's description who has been taken hostage, and Ferrington, who has asked to leave the inquiry, answers it. The man is Spector, held at gunpoint by Jimmy Tyler after a brief struggle and interrogated about the whereabouts of his estranged wife Liz. Jimmy's accomplice shoots Ferrington in her flak jacket, and is shot dead by Ferrington's fellow officer; Jimmy escapes.

The consequences run in three directions at once. Because Jimmy's intervention in Belfast has compromised the surveillance operation, Gibson abandons the plan to keep watching and has DS Tom Anderson arrest Spector for the abduction of Rose Stagg. Glen Martin and Gail McNally arrest Sally Ann Spector for perverting the course of justice over the false alibi she gave for him, and PC Hagstrom leads a team to intercept Katie at the hotel. The episode's most damaging material is the video recovered from Spector's phone. Gibson, watching the interviews from behind the scenes, is shown footage of Rose pleading for her life with the suspect's face on camera; Rose moves between appeals, offers and threats in an attempt to survive, and Spector later turns the camera on himself. Gibson watches the tape in tears. The search team finds Spector's car burnt out, with conflicting evidence inside it, and the decorating shears are confirmed to carry Joe Brawley's blood as well as Spector's partial print, which adds a murder charge to the abduction charge. Spector is then in custody and silent.

The record's strength is the recovered video of Rose, the point at which the series' argument about victims and its plot machinery coincide, since the tape is at once the evidence and the crime. Its weakness is that the arrest arrives by coincidence: the police's whole strategy is displaced by a criminal who has nothing to do with the case, which several recaps treated as an engineered shortcut rather than a payoff. What sets the episode apart is that it breaks the series' own structure. The first four records watch a man; this one arrests him, and the last two are about custody rather than pursuit. It is also the final appearance of Archie Panjabi's Reed Smith, and the episode in which the question of what was done to Spector at the children's home is left explicitly open: Jensen denies it, and the series does not settle the matter here. What the burnt car contained is not stated by any source consulted.