Duty and Honour(2)

Duty and Honour (2) raises the temperature on the academy case in the bluntest way possible: a sniper kills one of Boyd's witnesses. That is not the sort of thing the Cold Case Unit usually deals with. Their dead have been dead for decades; this one was alive long enough to talk, which makes his murder both a tragedy and an admission of guilt from whoever ordered it.

The team scrambles to work through the remaining suspects before anyone else is picked off, and for a while it feels less like an investigation than a protection racket with paperwork. Then the story produces its key: an Iraqi woman whose testimony unlocks what actually happened at the heart of the case. It is a smart move by the writers, Barbara Machin and Adrian Mead, because it pulls the English woodland mystery back to the war that created it, and it gives the finale a voice rather than just another body.

Robert Bierman directed, with Trevor Eve as DSI Peter Boyd, Sue Johnston as Dr Grace Foley, Tara Fitzgerald as Dr Eve Lockhart, Wil Johnson as DI Spencer Jordan and Félicité Du Jeu as DC Stella Goodman. The military-academy side stays well stocked: Jamie Sives as Rob Lomax, Nicholas Farrell as Douglas Malham, Luke Bailey as Paul Overton, Richard Riddell as Andy Tyrrel and Elliott Jordan as Mark Bennet.

The two-parter earns its title in this half, since duty and honour turn out to be exactly the things everyone involved has been trading away. The institution trained young men for a dirty trade and then treated them as disposable when the trade turned messy, and the episode's anger about that is quiet but real. It avoids making the soldiers monsters or saints, which is more restraint than many procedurals would manage with this material.

A strong finish to series seven's most political story. The cold case format suits it oddly well: everything that went wrong abroad came home to be buried here, and it took a mummified hand and a sniper's rifle to dig it back up.