Trial & Retribution III (2)

Everything that was coiled up in Warrington comes out in this second half. Pat North is abducted by the man she was sent to pacify, and forced to find Cassie's corpse for herself. It is a horrible, personal cruelty, aimed at a woman who has done nothing but her job, and the episode does not look away from it. Walker, meanwhile, is too caught up in his own case to see the danger his partner is in, which is its own kind of failure, the sort the show is good at leaving unspoken.

Warrington is eventually brought to trial. On the face of it the case should be simple. But the courtroom soon gives up deeper secrets, and it becomes clear that Karl Wilding, the houseboat man with the alcoholic wife, had a part to play in Cassie's death too. The neat line between one villain and another blurs, and the trial stops being a formality and becomes something closer to archaeology, digging at layers nobody wanted to examine.

Richard E. Grant is back as Warrington, and he is better here than in the first half, all wounded vanity and menace that flickers on and off like a faulty light. Anthony Higgins' Wilding is a different kind of wrong, quieter and more patient. David Hayman's Walker and Dorian Lough's Satchell carry the police side, with Jo Dow's Barrow and Shan Khan's Dawes in support. Felicity Dean's Susan Warrington and Amanda Boxer's Rebecca Wilding round out the households, and both women make you feel for them without a word of explanation.

Lynda La Plante wrote it, Jo Johnson directed. The result is a story that refuses to stay tidy. Just when you think you have the measure of the man in the dock, the ground shifts, and the show leaves you with the uneasy feeling that justice here will cost everyone something.