Trial & Retribution XXI: Ghost Train (2)

The funfair closes ranks. That's the obstacle in this second half: Tess was right that something happened, but the people who work the rides and run the stalls want nothing to do with Walker's team, and their silence has a texture to it that goes past loyalty into fear. An arrest does eventually come, a Romanian worker called Pavel, who had actually been going out with the girl who fell from the Big Wheel. It looks like the answer. It isn't. The episode is being honest about how these things actually go: you take the person the evidence points at, and then the evidence moves. Pavel is not the murderer, and the case is left exactly where it started, minus one wrong man detained.

Which leaves the big question standing in the open. What part did the development company play in the deaths at the fair? The show never quite lets you forget that someone benefits from a dead girl and a dead fair owner, and benefit isn't proof, which is precisely the frustration the episode runs on. It is the kind of suspicion that can be voiced in a drama and never in a courtroom, and the episode knows the difference.

It's a quieter hour than part one, and better for it. Stefan Schwartz directs with patience; Hayman and Smurfit do most of the heavy lifting as Walker and Connor, with Jack James as Mickey Olsen, Helen Steinway Bailey as Vicky and Martin Brodie appearing again as Tommy Gilbert, whose murder still hangs over everything.

The honest note here is how unsatisfying the truth turns out to be. A girl fell. Someone killed Tommy Gilbert. The obvious suspect didn't do it, the powerful suspects stay unprosecuted, and the audience leaves knowing less than they'd like about both deaths. Some will find that a cheat. I think it's the point: money doesn't leave fingerprints, and this show was always more interested in what the system fails to catch than in tidy confessions at the half-hour mark.