Trial & Retribution VIII: Blue Eiderdown (2)

The second night reopens the old wound. Susan Delray's murder, unsolved since the nineties, is back on the table, and the working question is whether the same hand killed both mother and daughter. What becomes clear as Connor and Walker dig is that Susan and Angela shared more than looks and a taste for high living. They moved through the same kind of world, twelve years apart.

That world has a centre: a luxurious private club run by Angela's boyfriend, Colin Salmon's Colin Thorpe. It caters discreetly to the tastes of rich members, however bizarre those tastes might be, and it's where the case's real geography lies. The membership list reads like an establishment roll call — Nicholas Farrell is Jonathan Southwood MP, Stephen Moore plays Judge Andrew Saxon, and Sean McGinley turns up as Ken Latham. When the people you need to question can pull rank on the people asking, the enquiry gets complicated in ways that have nothing to do with forensics.

Connor and Walker are drawn further into this seductive, sinister set than they intend to be, and the show doesn't pretend they're immune to it. That's one of the more interesting things here: two coppers who've seen everything finding themselves slightly off balance in a room full of powerful people behaving badly. Sarah Ozeke's DC Lisa West, Dorian Lough's DS Satchell and William Chubb's Chief Supt Wilkes hold the procedural side together while the leads go wading in.

La Plante wrote it, Paul Unwin directed again, and Kathryn Sumner continues her double duty as both Delray women, which gives the story its melancholy undertow: the daughter ending where the mother did, more or less.

It resolves with more satisfaction than Suspicion managed, though not without cost. Blue Eiderdown is the series doing what it does best: following money and influence into rooms the police aren't meant to enter, and refusing to look away from what's inside.