Every Breath You Take (2)

Part two of Every Breath You Take starts with too many answers. The stalker, Christopher Redford, is ready to confess to killing Debbie Briton. Her married lover is found and questioned, and denies it. Somewhere in the middle sit an ex-husband and the married father of her unborn child, all with reasons to lie. A confession should end a case. This one just opens a bigger question.

Grace Foley does not believe Redford. She never did believe him in part one, and now he is offering to sign the whole thing away and she still will not buy it. Sue Johnston plays that doubt beautifully: the quiet certainty of someone who has spent a career listening to guilty men and knows what they sound like. Boyd and the squad keep working the lover angle while Grace digs at the confession, and the gap between the police version and the psychological one widens until the case splits down the middle.

The cast carries it well. Trevor Eve as Boyd, Holly Aird as Frankie Wharton, Claire Goose as Amelia Silver, Wil Johnson as Spencer, Simon Kunz as DAC Christie. Thomas Lockyer's DI Maitland gets more room this week, with Tessa Peake-Jones as his wife Fiona and Paloma Baeza as Anna. Lee Ross makes Redford genuinely uncomfortable to watch. Barbara Machin wrote it, Gary Love directed.

What the episode understands is that a false confession is its own kind of mystery. Redford wants the guilt, for whatever tangled reason, and that desire is stranger than any alibi. The team has to work out not who could have killed Debbie but why one man is so desperate to say he did.

It resolves cleanly enough by the close, though the memory that lingers is Grace refusing to take yes for an answer. Boyd wants the confession ticked and the file closed. Grace wants it to be true first. The episode takes her side of the argument seriously, which is why it works: the truth about Debbie has to be dug out properly, for her sake and the baby's, not accepted from the nearest man willing to carry it.

A solid end to the first series' opening two-parter, and a fine early turn for what Johnston can do with very little.