The Hardest Word (2)

Part two opens with a dead policeman. DS Dave Marvin is found in a parking lot tied to the case, throat slashed, and someone has tried to carve into his body before being interrupted. No sexual activity this time, which breaks the pattern. The word "Sorry" still made it onto his back.

The revelations come thick after that. Raymond Carstairs, embittered in the way only family secrets can make a man, explains that his father was headmaster of a children's school who abused the pupils, including his own son. Grace Foley works out something stranger about the physical evidence: the semen on the victims may have been bought online, which turns the profile of the killer inside out. And two loose threads keep pulling. Greta Simpson is hiding something from the squad, and an old man keeps turning up wherever a body is found.

It builds to the expected clash between Bulmer and Boyd, which given how part one went surprises nobody and satisfies anyway. Barbara Machin and Doug Milburn wrote it, Philippa Langdale directed, and the cast holds up its end: Trevor Eve, Sue Johnston as Grace, Holly Aird as Frankie, Claire Goose as Silver, Wil Johnson as Spencer, Phil Daniels as Bulmer, Emma Fielding as Greta, Julian Glover as William Laurence, Phyllida Law as Mrs Carstairs and James Dreyfus as Raymond.

The school abuse material is hard going, and the episode knows it; Dreyfus plays the son's confession without a scrap of melodrama, which makes it worse. Grace's theory about bought semen is typical of the show at its best, taking one clinical detail and letting it redraw everything you assumed about the killer.

What stays with you is the apology itself. A killer carving "Sorry" into victims suggests guilt, but guilt that has never once stopped the killing. That contradiction carries the whole story, and part two does not try to soften it. Whoever wrote that word wanted forgiveness they had no intention of earning, and the squad has to work out whether the grief is real or just decoration on a habit.