In Sight of the Lord (2)

The pattern resolves in part two: the victims were friends, all of them in the same army regiment during the war, and the killer is working through the survivors one by one. Revenge, then. The problem is arithmetic as much as detection; Boyd's team knows there must be a next name on the list, and nobody can find him.

The motive, once it surfaces, is dreadful in the way this show does best. A brutal gang rape during or after the war, a pregnancy that followed, and a suicide at the end of it. The killings are a reckoning for that, delivered sixty years late with a nine-inch nail. It reframes everything part one established: George Western, the conscientious objector nailed to his living room floor, turns out to have been chosen rather than stumbled upon. The episode doesn't excuse the killer, but it does insist you understand him, and the writing holds that line without flinching.

What stays with me is the squad's helplessness in the middle stretch. Cold case work usually means the danger has long expired; here it is live, ticking towards an unknown address. That inversion gives the hour its tension.

Barbara Machin and Tony McHale wrote it, Andy Hay directed again. Trevor Eve heads things up as Boyd, alongside Sue Johnston, Holly Aird, Claire Goose and Wil Johnson. Michael Byrne, Geoffrey Bayldon and Clive Wood carry much of the wartime material as Joe Brackley, Edward Atkinson and Neil Clayton, JJ Feild plays Adam Western, and Kananu Kirimi is Sophie Davis.

A strong close to the pair, and a heavy one. The show has always argued that the past isn't somewhere else, just unvisited, and this story makes the point about as forcefully as it ever has. Old soldiers, old crimes, and a debt someone decided was still owed.