Shock

A woman's body is found in a love nest, and the case starts with a clear picture. Maggie is handed it and does what she always does, building the scene up detail by detail until the crime shows its shape. The love nest is the kind of rented, unlived-in place that makes a death feel lonelier, and the episode makes the most of it. But what the follow-up turns up is a set of shocks for everyone connected to the dead woman, and for a couple of people who thought they weren't connected at all.

Brian Rylands and his brother Peter circle the case like men with something to lose, and Robert Austin and Christopher Bramwell make them convincingly shifty. Floella Benjamin's Gloria is the kind of witness who knows more than she's saying, which the episode leaves you to sit with. Terence Halliday's John and Herbert Norville's Jackie give the inquiry its texture, with John Rolfe's police doctor supplying the clinical details. The case keeps its feet in the everyday while the shocks mount up. William Marlowe's Russell and Derek Thompson's Fenton back Maggie up, and Brian Gwaspari's Croft is on hand as the second opinion nobody asked for.

Roger Marshall and Terence Feely wrote the script, and Tony Wharmby directed it with the steady hand the series favours. Nothing here is flashy. The shocks the title promises arrive quietly, in interviews and small revelations, and the show trusts the details to do the work. Nothing is solved with a confession and a chase; the answers come from witnesses remembering things they'd rather forget.

It's the kind of episode that lives or dies on the believability of its uncovering, and this one holds. The truth about the dead woman is sadder and messier than the initial picture suggested, and the people around her turn out to be more ordinary than the love nest made them seem. That's often how it goes.