Magdalene 26 (2)

Part two starts in the worst possible place for a police team: a hospital corridor after a shooting. Stella is wounded, the shooter is dead, and the usual route of interrogation is gone before it begins. The body still has something to say, and the clue it carries leads back to the cold case. Then a woman turns up who looks almost exactly like the one in the hospital, and the resemblance gives the whole story a nasty fairy-tale edge.

The priest becomes the hinge. Father Quinn connects to a club murder from 1967, and he earns his keep in the present by pulling Elizabeth out of the hospital ahead of the Turkish mafia. The episode ties her questionable business dealings to her earlier kidnapping, so every thread from part one doubles back on itself. The cold case and the organised crime turn out to be personal, and the danger lands on people the team already knows.

Barbara Machin and Declan Croghan wrote it, and Andy Hay 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, Félicité Du Jeu as DS Stella Goodman and Stacey Roca as DS Katrina Howard. Sharon Maughan plays both Michelle and Elizabeth, with Lisa Dwyer Hogg as their teenage selves, Elizabeth Barrett as the young Michelle and Denise Gough as Kathleen.

Losing Stella to a hospital bed changes the feel of the investigation. The squad is one body down and one worry up, and Boyd has to push the case forward while a member of his team lies recovering from a bullet. It grounds the story in a way the plot mechanics alone would not manage.

But as second parts go this one is busy, and the busyness mostly pays off. The double-casting is the kind of trick that can sink a story; here it feeds the central worry, which is that nobody in this case is quite who they look like. Part two keeps that anxiety running to the last scene, and it lands.