Trial & Retribution IX: The Lovers (2)

The second night widens the frame. Other people have vanished into thin air as well, cases scattered across the map that nobody had thought to join up, and once the police do join them the word nobody wants to say starts to look unavoidable: serial killer.

The trail leads through CCTV at Covent Garden market, where Tom Franke turns out to be a regular — and where Susan Harrington disappeared. Here's what makes the hour interesting: Franke doesn't fit the pattern of a calculating serial offender, and Walker knows it. He simply won't rule the man out on instinct alone, which is either good policing or an obsession, and the episode lets that hang. When his image is broadcast and the appeal goes out for anyone who knows him, Franke does something worse than run. He moves towards the case. A still frantic Susan Harrington is promised a meeting with her missing husband, and she goes to it because of course she does.

He isn't as clever as he thinks. The arrest comes quickly, then a murder charge, and the story shifts into the courtroom half that gives the series its name. Julian Glover appears as Guy Harper Knowles QC and Patrick Godfrey as Mr Gordon, with Gemma Jones's Dr Jean Mullins drawn into the psychiatric side. Because the trial's central question isn't really did he do it. It's whether Tom Franke is mad or bad: whether he can tell right from wrong, and what the law owes him if he can't.

Michael Feast gets the meatiest material here, playing a man who seems ordinary in every direction until you look too long. Hayman and Smurfit keep the procedural spine straight around him; Satchell and West carry the legwork.

Mad or bad is an old question, but it's handled without lectures, and the verdict lands with real weight. The Lovers turns out to be one of the stronger two-parters in the later run.