Trial & Retribution VII: Suspicion (2)

The second night pays off the mystery, and it turns out the missing woman has a name and a family with influence. Diane Winfield vanished after another row with her husband Greg, Charles Dance's Greg Harwood, who says she simply walked out. Her parents, Judge and Lady Winfield, aren't willing to accept that, and they lean on Walker to find their daughter. When a judge applies pressure, a copper feels it.

Walker digs, and what he turns up starts to link with Connor's murder enquiry. The severed hand in the Thames and the woman who left her home in the middle of a marriage turn out to be threads of one story, and at the centre of it sits a killer who has come closer to the perfect murder than anyone has a right to be. There is still no body. Without one, even a case you can see clearly is a case that might never reach a courtroom, and the episode is honest about how frightening that is. A clever enough killer doesn't just get away with it; he gets to pretend it never happened.

Connor and Walker lock horns along the way, which is half the pleasure of these stories. She works the enquiry, he works the angles, and neither is much inclined to simply agree with the other. Sara Kestelman appears as Judge Emily Hillard, with Ben Cross's DS Taylor Matthews, Neve McIntosh's Carla Worth, Georgia Mackenzie's PC Alison Daniels, Gemma Jones as Jean Mullins and Inday Ba as DC Lisa West around them.

It's a grim, controlled piece of television, and Dance is its cold centre — Greg Harwood may be the most chilling thing he did in this era, which given his back catalogue is saying something. The ending offers justice of a sort, but it leaves you uneasy about how near the wrong side of "never" this one came.

Suspicion earns its two nights. Few cases in the series feel this close to getting away.