Trial & Retribution XVII: Conviction (2)

Ken Randle confesses to killing Nick Fisher, and the case looks tidy for about a scene. Dyer is released. The man who spent twelve years hating an innocent one has now handed in a guilty plea of his own, and you can feel the courtroom settling into the comfortable shape of a solved murder.

Then Sarah comes to see Walker.

She's anxious, and no wonder. She wants to tell him what actually happened on the night her brother died, and what she says quietly dismantles everything the trial was built on. The charge against Randle starts to look like it won't stick, and here's the cruel arithmetic of it: the truth arriving late helps nobody who needed it early. Mark is still dead. Nick Fisher is still dead. And the family that Ken tried to avenge is left standing in the wreckage of both.

This is the half where Trial & Retribution does what it does best, which is to let procedure and grief pull against each other until something gives. Maurice Roëves plays Ken as a man whose confession might be the last honest act available to him, even if it solves nothing. Lorraine Perez gives Sarah's visit real weight; it takes more nerve to speak up twelve years on than it ever took to keep quiet.

Julie Dixon and Lynda La Plante wrote it, Paul Wilmshurst directed. David Hayman holds the middle of it all as Walker, with Victoria Smurfit as Connor and Dorian Lough as Satchell. Johnny Harris returns as Terry Dyer, Kierston Wareing plays Leigh Fisher, Tom Ellis appears as Nick, Aimee-Marie Bow as young Sarah, and Nigel Betts gets the unenviable job of prosecution barrister.

Not every ending here is justice, whatever the verdict turns out to be. Some of it is just damage, distributed fairly evenly among people who deserved better.