Trial & Retribution XIV: Mirror Image (2)

The twins have an alibi and it looks water-tight. Walker doesn't believe it, or at least something about the pair keeps nagging at him long after a sensible man would have moved on. What troubles him is the shape of the relationship between them: Michael is plainly the dominant one, and the way he manages his asthmatic brother reads less like affection and more like handling. The boys are arrested and sent for trial anyway, and once the court gets its teeth into the family, everything starts leaking.

The secrets come out in the worst order, which is to say the most damaging one. Michael claims a history of abuse from his father, which reframes the patricide charge entirely: motive, sympathy, the whole emotional register of the trial shifts under everyone's feet. Then the net widens again when it emerges that Commander Delany was being unfaithful to his wife with Janet, the housekeeper. The dead man's own conduct joins the evidence pile. It's a very Trial & Retribution move — the victim was no saint, and the household he kept was rotting quietly long before anyone died in it.

Fiona Shaw is back as Jo Wilson QC and she's worth the licence fee on her own, all edges and precision in a courtroom that badly needs unsettling. Michelle Fairley does fine, wounded work as Janet Jenkins, the woman whose affair turns out to sit closer to the centre of this than anyone guessed.

No writer or director is credited for this half in the records I've seen, so they'll go unnamed here, but whoever cut it together understood the assignment. Part two of a Mirror Image has one job: take the tidy suspicion Connor built in part one and complicate it until the audience can't remember who they wanted convicted. That happens here. The alibi holds, the behaviour doesn't, and the gap between those two facts is where the whole case finally lives.