Final Cut (2)

The Notting Hill house keeps giving up its dead. The evidence settles it: the place was a dumping ground for bodies, and the four corpses behind its walls came from several separate events rather than one bad night. The film, the renovations, the mummified body from part one, all of it was just the house finally running out of places to hide things.

Worse, the gangster responsible is still active, and having his handiwork dug up provokes exactly what you'd expect: more murders, and an escalation into what looks like an international turf war. A cold case about the sixties becomes a live operation about right now, with Boyd's squad suddenly negotiating between old secrets and people prepared to kill over them.

The key to all of it is personal. Spencer's family history, his years in that house, turns out to be what unlocks the mystery, and the episode gives Wil Johnson the best material of the season to work with. Stephen Davis and Barbara Machin wrote it, Betsan Morris Evans directed, and the supporting cast earns its pay: Gina Bellman as Frannie Henning, Maurice Roëves as Vinnie Peverell, Sharon D. Clarke as Camelia Baptiste, Larissa Murray as Patricia Quinn, and Ken Russell, better known as the director of The Devils, as Gerry Raistrick.

It closed the third series on 6 October 2003, and it sends Spencer's story somewhere the show rarely dares: a regular character whose childhood becomes the evidence bag everyone else is rummaging through.

What I admire is the ambition. A story that starts in one basement and ends spanning continents could easily feel absurd, but the writing grounds every expansion in character, particularly Spencer's, so the widening stakes never float free of the people carrying them. The gangster at the centre is given a proper history rather than a scar and a snarl. Not many procedurals would trust a supporting detective's boyhood to hold a finale together. This one does, and it works.