Trial & Retribution XIII: Curriculum Vitae (2)

The second night finds a body from the past. The team learns that Rachel, in one of her previous nanny jobs under one of her borrowed names, worked for a couple whose baby son, Joe, also died in infancy. One dead child might be misfortune; the same nanny standing over two of them is a pattern, and Walker wants that little coffin opened. He wants Joe exhumed.

The family split tells you everything before anyone says a word. Gina Casper eventually agrees to cooperate with the police. Her husband Lee is dead against it, and not just with the general grief-stricken stubbornness you'd expect. He's defensive of Rachel personally, which stops being a mystery once you learn he had an affair with her back then. So there's a marriage with a corpse of its own buried somewhere in it, and Walker's spade is heading straight for both.

And then the script turns the other barrel. Suzy, Poppy's mother, is revealed to be in fragile mental health, fragile enough that the possibility she killed her own daughter has to sit on the table alongside every other theory. It's an uncomfortable place for the story to go, and Philip Gladwin and Lynda La Plante don't flinch from it. Everyone connected to these two dead babies is hiding something, even if most of what they're hiding is ordinary human mess rather than murder.

David Hayman gets to do what he does best here: the quiet, granite certainty of a man who won't leave a question unasked. Victoria Smurfit's Connor, Dorian Lough's Satchell and Ryan Kiggell's Dobbs hold the investigation steady around him. Sinead Matthews keeps Rachel unreadable right to the end, and the supporting turns are strong — Paul Hilton as the cornered Lee, Gillian Kearney as Gina, Dominic Rowan as Matthew Ryan, Teo-Wa Vuong as Kim-ly Chang and Arsher Ali as Radi.

Tristram Powell directs it all with real restraint. The answer, when it comes, reorders half of what you assumed on night one. That's the mark of a good second half.