Skin (2)

Part two of Skin finds the squad chasing a live suspect for a change. Jim Brown has a young hostage and the clock is running. The mummified body on the waste ground has turned the case into a race, and somewhere in Brown's past lies the answer to who murdered Sam seventeen years earlier. Boyd means to have it before the standoff goes wrong.

The twist is that the dead man turns out to be the unreliable one. Digging into Sam's past, the team discovers he was not who he claimed to be, and the hidden agenda changes the shape of the whole inquiry. The victim stops being a martyr and becomes a question mark. The hunt for his killer turns into a verdict on the life he actually lived, and the squad finds itself sorting through a dead man's lies to reach a truth nobody asked for.

Clive Bradley, Declan Croghan and Barbara Machin wrote it, and Edward Bennett directed. Trevor Eve leads as DSI Peter Boyd, with 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. Philip Whitchurch returns as Jim Brown, Jo Woodcock as Natalie Brown, Cyril Nri as Raymond Ayanike, John Dougall as Terry Wilson, and Johnny Palmiero in the double role of George and Sam.

The hostage plot gives part two something the first half never had: momentum. Skin (1) could afford to sit and brood over an unsympathetic victim and a wall of silence. Here the team has to move, and the urgency suits them. Boyd works best when he is cross, and holding a child hostage makes him properly cross.

As second halves go this is a tidy one. The writers take the ugly questions from part one, give them a deadline, and the resolution lands harder for it. Not every thread gets the attention it might have had, and the supporting cast are a little short-changed. But the central swap, a dead man you cannot trust, keeps the whole thing honest. Most cold cases are about what people buried. This one is about the victim burying himself, and the truth only surfaces when Boyd digs past the story Sam told.