Trial & Retribution XII: Paradise Lost (2)

Night two picks up with Walker doing something slightly reckless on a hunch: he decides Milton Jones is innocent and puts him to work helping the enquiry. It's the sort of gamble that could end a career, though in fairness Walker has made worse calls over the years. For a while it looks like it might pay off. DNA and forensic work turn up a likely suspect, and everything is moving along nicely until the identification parade, where Jones simply cannot pick the man out clearly. All that science, undone by one shaky witness.

Roisin Connor is running her own line meanwhile. She finds the thread tying the victims together: all of them were connected to a single local nightclub. When she goes digging there she meets a wall of hostility from the staff, and she does it against Walker's better judgement, which he makes no secret of. You can argue both sides. He wants the case tidy; she wants the truth that lives behind the velvet rope.

Then there's Neil Dench, the barrister she's sleeping with. When the evidence starts pointing at Milton again, back in the frame and possibly fitted up, her affair stops being a private embarrassment and becomes something that could damage the trial's verdict outright. The show has always liked this idea, that the people delivering justice are barely holding their own lives together, and here it lands properly.

Julie Dixon wrote it and Alex Pillai directs both halves. The credited support is slim but useful: Fred Ridgeway as Terry Tennant and Mark Rhino Smith as Nicholas, the bouncer you suspect Roisin should have started with.

It's a satisfying close to a case that earned its darkness. The nightclub link gives the murders a squalid logic, Jones gets to be more than a suspect in his own story, and Connor comes through compromised and still standing, which is very much her way. Not everything ties off neatly; a couple of the personal threads are left fraying on purpose. But the second night answers the first honestly, and that's all a two-parter owes you.