Trial & Retribution V (2)

The second half of the story circles the mummified baby found under the boarding house, and it is the grimmest kind of cold case, one where the victim never grew up. DNA settles the basic facts. The child's mother was Kathleen Norton, daughter of the people who once owned the place, and the father was Graham Richards. What the lab cannot settle is who is guilty of what. Walker charges Kathleen with the murders, and that is where the trouble starts, because Satchell is not convinced. He thinks Graham Richards should be standing in the dock as well, and the argument between the two men runs under everything else in the episode. Two senior detectives openly disagreeing about who belongs in the dock is a luxury most crime shows cannot afford; this one gives it the whole episode.

It is an uncomfortable question to sit with. The evidence is scientific and clean, but the crime is anything but, buried in the middle of a family and decades of silence. Kathleen's mother Dorothy, played by the wonderful Liz Smith, and Susan Engel's quiet presence as Sylvia Newberg, show you what the Norton household was like without a word being wasted. Maggie McCarthy's Kathleen carries the weight of the charges, and Sean Chapman's Richards is all careful blankness, a man who has learned to say nothing useful.

Lynda La Plante wrote it, Aisling Walsh directed. It went out in June 2001, and there is nothing seasonal about it. The regulars are in place: Hayman's Walker, Kate Buffery's North, Dorian Lough's Satchell, Paul Kynman's Batchley, with Jacqueline Tong as Lynn Walker and Simon Callow appearing as Rupert Halliday. The argument about Richards gives Satchell his best material of the series so far, and Lough makes the most of it.

What the episode does well is refuse to hand you an easy villain. Kathleen did what the DNA says she did. The law wants a clean verdict; the family left behind wants something no court was ever going to supply. And yet.