Care (2)

Care (2) turns the screw on the first half. The team are no longer chasing a straightforward monster. The episode asks whether they are hunting a monstrous child-stealer or misguided saviours, and refuses to give a clean answer either way. That ambiguity is the point of it.

The break in the case comes from Sarah Cavendish. She finds a letter Clare wrote to her mother in 1989, three years after the abduction, insisting she was very happy. It reads like a hostage note with better handwriting, and it leads the team to a house in Sussex. The place is empty now, but it has clearly held children. Grace Foley works out that several of them, Clare and David Drew among them, were taken from the home by social workers who feared for their welfare. The social workers were Leo and Karen Harding, and their own grown children are numbered among the rescued.

Then the darker facts arrive. Drew was the boy who gouged out Fenchurch's eyes, and he did it after Fenchurch was accidentally run over. When Clare met Teresa, she threatened to blow the whistle on the whole operation, and that is what got her murdered. By whom, though? The letter and the house tell one story; the bodies tell another. And which of the Hardings' boys is Drew?

Barbara Machin and Richard Warlow wrote it, with Edward Bennett directing. Trevor Eve's Boyd, Sue Johnston's Grace, Tara Fitzgerald's Eve, Wil Johnson's Jordan and Eva Birthistle's Cavendish carry the case, with Philip Wright as Broading, Mary Jo Randle as Trish Somers and the Harding family played by Nicholas Jones, Iddo Goldberg and Steve John Shepherd.

The moral ground shifts under your feet all the way through. People who spent their lives rescuing children from a rotten institution may have ended up killing to protect the rescue. That is not an easy thing to hold in your head, and the episode does not pretend otherwise.