Missing Persons (2)

Missing Persons (2) closes out the story that opened series seven, and its central question is a good old-fashioned identity mystery: who exactly is Lore Carson, and why is she in danger? Boyd and the team spend the hour pulling at that thread, working on the sensible theory that keeping her alive and working out who she really is amount to the same job.

The answer lies abroad. Reporters arrive from Ireland, Algeria and the Basque country, each carrying a piece of the puzzle, and the case's roots in the political violence of earlier decades come fully into view. What looked like a domestic mugging gone wrong in part one turns out to be an old debt being collected. The show handles the international material with more care than you might expect from a BBC procedural, resisting the urge to turn every foreign visitor into a plot delivery device.

Declan Croghan and Barbara Machin wrote it, Tim Fywell directed. Trevor Eve leads as DSI Peter Boyd, with Wil Johnson as DI Spencer Jordan, Félicité Du Jeu as DC Stella Goodman, Sue Johnston as Dr Grace Foley and Tara Fitzgerald as Dr Eve Lockhart. Beatriz Batarda carries a lot of the episode as Lore, and carries it well; Justine Mitchell plays Una Doyle, Marina Koem is Fatima Yacif, Daniel Cerqueira is Brahim Haddou and Angus Wright is Stephen Carson.

The pleasure here is watching two clocks run against each other: the team slowly assembling the truth while whoever wants Lore dead moves faster. The writers keep her sympathetic without making her innocent, which is trickier than it sounds, and by the time the full picture arrives you understand why everyone has been so cagey for sixty minutes of television.

It is a tidy close to a story that took real risks for this series. Cold cases usually mean old bodies; this one meant living people who never stopped looking over their shoulders. That gives the finale a different flavour, less forensic poetry and more unfinished business with teeth. Not every thread resolves as neatly as you'd like, but the ending lands, and Sarah's family gets to stop waiting for the worst.