Episode 3

The ransom is three million pounds, and Geoffrey has to find it while the police try to get the boy eyewitness to talk. The episode runs the two struggles in parallel, and neither is going well. Geoffrey scrambles between banks and contacts, learning that raising a fortune quickly is a different skill from having one, while the officers around the boy try to coax out a testimony that may or may not come. The figure is precise, which makes it feel real in a way a round number would not.

The pressure shows in everyone. The sum is so large that suspicion spreads through every interaction, and the script is good at letting the money sit in the room like a third character. Frances and the others caught in the orbit of the investigation carry the emotional fallout, and the boy at the centre of the police effort becomes the point the whole episode turns on. Every handshake and phone call is a test, and the episode knows the audience is counting the minutes along with Geoffrey.

Peter Barkworth plays Geoffrey Carr, with Harriet Walter as Frances Carr and Derek Thompson as Frank Crossan. David Lyon appears as Simon, Simon Jones as Lansbury, Linda Spurrier as Margaret, Nicholas Jones as Andrew, Aingeal Grehan as Kate, Adrian Dunbar as Willy and Susanna Reid as Clare. Peter Barkworth and Peter Ransley wrote it, and Peter Smith directed.

But the episode is at its best when it lets the clock tick in the background and the characters sit with what the money is doing to them. Financial jeopardy mixing with police procedure is the series' home turf, and this instalment works it hard. Desperate circumstances dismantle carefully built lives, and nobody here gets to keep their composure for long. It is the middle chapter of the serial, and it does the job a middle chapter should: raises the price and tightens the screw.