Trial & Retribution X: Sins Of The Father (2)

The second night closes in on the answer, and it comes from an unlikely source: Emily's diary. Before that, the shape of things is clear enough. Dr Mullins is certain the death was anything but accidental, Connor is certain it was friend or family, and one detail keeps nagging. Emily came home an hour early that day. You come home early to meet someone.

The diary supplies the who. She and Michael Summerby, the teenage neighbour, had been seeing each other, and she meant to end it. That's a motive with a terrible simplicity to it, and Michael is duly arrested and charged. What follows is the more uncomfortable half of the story: he won't work with his barrister, Janet Suzman's Winifred Morgan QC, and he is very obviously sitting on something. Andrew Lee Potts plays him as a boy who seems guilty of something, which is not quite the same as guilty of this, and the episode is careful about the difference.

Walker's side of the hour stays painfully domestic. His son Richard has been arrested for injuring swans at a local pond, with a small amount of cannabis on him, and answers nothing beyond a sullen silence. Walker, who can read killers for a living, cannot get a word out of his own fifteen-year-old, and Hayman plays that helplessness beautifully. The police agree not to press charges so long as the boy has therapy; Walker takes time off to see it through.

Greg Wise, Nadia Cameron-Blakey, Claire Bloom, Michael Fassbender, Dorian Lough and Sarah Ozeke fill out the ensemble. La Plante wrote it, Andy Hay again directs.

Sins Of The Father earns its title on both sides of the case — fathers, sons, secrets, and the cost of assuming you know a child. The resolution lands hard without feeling cheap, which is more than most procedurals manage at series ten.