Walking on Water (2)

Another Lovell turns up dead, and the discovery is as grim as anything series three manages: found in the family boatyard under a pile of cockles, minus a head and hands. Someone very much wanted this body unidentified. Following the murder of Mark Lovell's cousin, meanwhile, the team establish that Mark has a watertight alibi, so the search narrows to the surviving members of the family itself.

Two threads complicate the hunt. First, drug dealing, tucked somewhere into the family's affairs. Second, involvement in the witness protection scheme, which raises the entertaining possibility that some of these Lovells aren't entirely who they say they are. A clan built on secrets gets a couple more, and Barbara Machin and Simon Mirren handle the unravelling with patience rather than pyrotechnics. Andy Hay directs.

Craig Kelly again plays Mark, with Alan McKenna as Martin Lovell, Ian Burfield as Stephen Lovell, Lorraine Pilkington as Mandy Lovell and Alan Ford as Jack Ely, still the most quietly frightening person in any scene he's given. The squad remains good company: Sue Johnston as Dr Grace Foley, Holly Aird as Dr Frankie Wharton, Claire Goose as DC Amelia Silver, Wil Johnson as DS Spencer Jordan, and Trevor Eve's Boyd, whose instinct that nobody in this family was innocent keeps looking better.

It aired on 22 September 2003, closing out a two-parter that began with an overturned conviction and ends with a body count the original trial never imagined. The Lovells, it turns out, were never one tragedy. They were a whole weather system of them. What I like is how the case grows sideways: a cleared man, then a murdered cousin, then a headless corpse in a boatyard, until the simple question of who killed the fisherman is nearly buried under everything that grew on top of it. Inheritance money, it turns out, was only ever the smallest of the Lovells' problems.