Episode 2

Frances and her step-daughter are kidnapped by rogue IRA members, and the crisis the first episode set up turns properly violent. Geoffrey is left with the kind of helplessness money cannot touch, and the episode is honest about how little his wealth does for him now. Conventional methods exhausted, he reaches out to an insurance man for help that the official channels cannot provide. His money, so central last week, is now useless, which is a lesson the serial intends to keep teaching.

Meanwhile the police are chasing a boy, the only eyewitness to the kidnapping. Everything rests on whether he talks, and the investigation circles around him while Geoffrey's private plea runs on a parallel track. The boy's silence is the fulcrum, and the episode is patient with him in a way it is patient with nothing else. The two lines of inquiry give the episode its shape: the desperate personal appeal against overwhelming odds, and the patient, grinding effort to secure a single testimony. Neither is close to working.

Peter Barkworth plays Geoffrey Carr, with Kate Thompson as Lucy and Antony Carrick as Bennett. Simon Jones appears as Lansbury, David Lyon as Simon and John Kavanagh as Kearney. The press pack is filled out by Gerry O'Brian, Garrett Keogh, Noel O'Donovan and Blanaid Irvine as reporters. Peter Barkworth and Peter Ransley wrote it, and Peter Smith directed.

But the episode's best quality is its refusal to hurry. The high stakes are allowed to sit alongside the methodical grind of an investigation, and Geoffrey's desperation gets room to breathe; nothing is yelled at the audience. Watching a man who has spent his life in control discover that control was never his to have is the quiet engine of the whole serial, and it starts turning in earnest here. The violence stays at the edge of the frame, which makes it more frightening.