False Flag (2)

Part two opens with the squad noticing they're being watched, and they're right: unauthorised surveillance equipment turns up around their operational area. Somebody with resources wants to know exactly how close the Cold Case Squad is getting to the truth about Gerald Doyle, the young man found with a car bomb in his demolished garage.

The picture keeps shifting. Doyle, presumed an Irish terrorist, was working for the English under a false flag, and the more the team learns, the less guilty he looks in the ways everyone originally assumed. Then a woman Boyd questioned during the investigation kills herself, and in the wreckage of that a missing link surfaces connecting her to what looks like an assassination. That's the moment the case stops being historical. The research notes give Boyd thirty-six hours to get to the bottom of things before the security services take over, and the episode runs on that clock, with every hour of it feeling borrowed from people who would rather he stopped asking.

This is the show doing le Carré by way of a police procedural, and it mostly works. The squad is outgunned and outcleared, chasing a murder where the trail leads into rooms they have no business entering. Trevor Eve gets to play Boyd furious and outmanoeuvred, which suits him.

Stephen Davis and Barbara Machin wrote it, Suri Krishnamma directed. Alongside Boyd there's Sue Johnston's Grace Foley, Holly Aird's Frankie Wharton, Claire Goose's Amelia Silver and Wil Johnson's Spencer Jordan. Timothy West and Dearbhla Molloy return as Joe and Maraid Doyle, with Oliver Cotton as Sir Charles Stewart, Danny Webb as Sir Martin Havering and Caroline Lee-Johnson as Asst Commissioner Dyson.

The conclusion lands taut and properly angry, in the way this series does when it turns its attention on the state. Doyle deserved better than a rubble pile and a false story, and the episode says so.