Mask of Sanity (2)

Part two opens with the thing part one threatened: another murder. Now Boyd is in a race, and the trail keeps bending backwards towards a children's home and whatever happened there many years ago. The past in this show is never past; it's just waiting somewhere with the lights off.

Then the case gets stranger. Dr Bruno Rivelli confesses to the three cold case murders. Then Harris Wall confesses too. Two confessions to the same three killings, which is one more than the arithmetic allows, and Boyd treats both with the suspicion they've earned. The question stops being who did it and becomes why everyone involved seems so keen to claim it, and what James Jenson, twenty years inside for crimes he may not have committed, actually is in all of this. A scapegoat, a volunteer, a witness nobody wanted? The episode keeps that ambiguity live right to the end, which takes nerve.

Trevor Eve plays Boyd with his usual refusal to accept a tidy answer, and the confessions give him exactly the kind of case he's worst at leaving alone. Sue Johnston is Dr Grace Foley, Tara Fitzgerald is Dr Eve Lockhart, and Wil Johnson's DI Spencer Jordan and Félicité Du Jeu's DC Stella Goodman do the legwork. Nicholas Beveney's Jenson stays quietly central without doing much at all, which is the point. Paul Ritter is Alan Pierce, James Fox plays Rivelli, Martin Marquez is Harris Wall and Jemma Redgrave is Sophie Wall.

Laurence Davey, Declan Croghan and Barbara Machin wrote it, David Thacker directs again.

The children's home material gives the whole story its real weight. Institutional care, old abuse, men carrying it into middle age and confessing to murder rather than say the simpler thing. It's grim, and the show handles it without exploitation. A strong finish to one of the series' more morally tangled cases.