False Flag (1)

A condemned garage comes down, and the rubble gives up two unwelcome things: the mummified body of Gerald Doyle, missing since 1981, and an unexploded car bomb beside him. The obvious reading writes itself. Doyle was an Irish terrorist with IRA sympathies; the bomb went wrong; case closed, more or less.

The diaries say otherwise. His parents produce them, and they reveal that Gerald was a mole for British intelligence, playing at being a terrorist while reporting to the other side. Which raises a question nobody in Whitehall wants examined: who knew what he really was, and did someone decide he was worth more dead than exposed? Boyd's team finds itself working a murder where the likeliest suspects wear suits and sign the Official Secrets Act, with the research notes framing the whole thing as a race against time once the skeleton triggers what it calls a tragic chain of events.

I like how the episode handles the politics. It keeps faith with both truths: Doyle genuinely moved in terrorist circles, and he genuinely betrayed them, and neither fact made him safe. The parents get the emotional core, spending twenty years believing one story about their son and then learning another.

Stephen Davis and Barbara Machin wrote it, Suri Krishnamma directed. Trevor Eve leads as Boyd with Sue Johnston as Grace Foley, Holly Aird as Frankie Wharton, Claire Goose as Amelia Silver and Wil Johnson as Spencer Jordan. Timothy West and Dearbhla Molloy play Joe and Maraid Doyle, with Frances de la Tour as Alice Taylor-Garrett, Danny Webb as Sir Martin Havering and Caroline Lee-Johnson as Asst Commissioner Dyson.

Part one does what the better two-parters here do: it takes a body from 1981 and uses it to put living institutions on trial. The bomb was found, the questions are open, and the establishment is already circling. Roll on part two.