Final Cut (1)

A mummified body turns up, and the trail leads somewhere odd even by cold case standards: a film. A supposedly fictional sixties picture shot a murderous fight between gangsters in a Notting Hill house, and when the squad starts pulling at that thread, the movie stops looking fictional at all.

Present-day renovation work at the property turns up more bodies behind the walls. So the film was a record of something real, or near enough, and the house has been keeping the receipts for forty years. Then comes the twist that lifts this two-parter above its premise: Spencer sits Boyd down and tells him that he and his family lived in that house when the events took place. Wil Johnson plays the revelation beautifully, quiet and level, a man discovering his own childhood is now evidence.

Stephen Davis and Barbara Machin wrote it, Betsan Morris Evans directed. The guests are a strong lot: Richard McCabe as Karl Meerman, Sharon D. Clarke as Camelia Baptiste, Maurice Roëves as Vinnie Peverell, Pat Bowie as Ann Jordan and Gina Bellman as Frannie Henning. Sue Johnston, Holly Aird, Claire Goose and Trevor Eve do their usual solid work around the bombshell.

It aired on 5 October 2003, and there's real pleasure in how it uses its idea. Old films are full of violence you're meant to enjoy; this one hid actual bodies behind its set dressing, and the show mines something properly eerie from the blur between what a camera captured and what really happened in that house.

By the end of the hour the case has outgrown the location. Somebody connected to those long-ago corpses is still alive, still dangerous, and still interested in what the walls might say. The first half closes with the past not merely unsolved but active, which is the show's whole thesis dressed up in gangster's Spandex.