The Mermaids Singing: Part 2

The second part of The Mermaids Singing has a problem that all two-part detective stories share: the investigation is nearly over, so the drama has to come from somewhere else. Wire in the Blood solves it by turning the profiler into the quarry. Tony Hill arrives at what he believes is a complete reading of the killer's psychology, and the act of understanding the man so thoroughly is what makes him the next target. From that point the story stops being about catching someone and becomes about whether Hill and Carol Jordan can keep him alive.

The police continue to work the gay scene, which is where the murders have been happening and where the force believes the motive lies. Hill works from the other end. He takes apart every piece of physical evidence and every detail of what was done to the bodies, and reconstructs the offender from it, in the process getting close enough to the killings to almost sense them as they happen. It is the show's first statement of its central claim about Hill — that his insight is a form of controlled identification, and that the control is the hard part.

The solution, carried over from McDermid's novel, is that the killer is Angelica, a transgender woman. McDermid wrote the book deliberately against the grain of American serial-killer fiction, in which women existed to be mutilated, and gave her killer a psychology rather than an appetite. The television version keeps that structure intact. The result is a resolution that readers of the novel will already know and that the episode declines to sensationalise.

What lifts the part above the ordinary is the way it rebalances the two leads. In the first part, Jordan is the officer who takes a chance on an outsider and pays a price in standing. Here she is the person whose judgement keeps him breathing, and the relationship shifts from professional to something the show will spend three series refusing to resolve. Hermione Norris plays the shift without ever stating it, which is the right choice: the scripts never have Jordan ask for anything, and Norris's performance makes the absence of the ask the point.

Where the part falls short is in the mechanics of the ending. The killer comes to Hill, rather than being found, and the show would use that device repeatedly over the next six years until it became a house style. It is effective here because the alternative would be an anticlimax, but it is worth noticing that the series solved its ending problem in 2002 with a trick it never replaced.

The episode drew 6.15 million, down from the premiere's 8.08 million, which is a normal fall for a second instalment and not evidence of trouble. Series 1 went on to take the Royal Television Society's award for Best Network Production in 2003, and this closing part is a reasonable part of why: it demonstrates that the show could make its own investigator the story without losing the plot.