Shadows Rising: Part 2

Shadows Rising concludes by joining its two investigations, and the join is worth the wait. The bones of a second young woman come out of the tarn, confirming Hill's conviction that the police are looking for more than one killing, and then a link is found between the person stalking Jack and Amanda Vance and the body in the water. Two cases that have run in parallel for an hour turn out to be one case, which is the point the first part was quietly building towards.

The escalation is delivered in a run of domestic intrusions that are more frightening than the show's usual register. Hate mail arrives, then a break-in at the Vances' home, then their dog is killed. It is a carefully staged movement from written threat to physical violation, and it works because the episode keeps the Vance marriage in view as something already strained — the couple are not merely victims, they are people whose professional partnership is compressed into a single household, and the killer is applying pressure exactly where it will be felt.

The relationship at the centre of the episode is Hill and Jordan's, and here the show does something it would return to repeatedly. The two of them are working separate investigations, and rather than growing closer through shared work, they are pushed apart by the absence of it. Jordan's irritation at having been kept off the murder enquiry in the first place does not dissipate when the cases merge; it hardens, and the professional slight is what makes the personal distance possible. Alan Whiting's script is careful to keep the disagreement about work rather than about feeling, which is both truer to the characters and more interesting than the alternative.

The episode also completes the adaptation of McDermid's novel of the same name as the series, which is a point worth making for readers who arrive at the show from the books. The first story adapted was the first novel, this one is the second, and the titles do not match the way a reader might expect: the series is named for this book, and the opening story is named for the other.

Where the part is weakest is in what it does not show. The television resolution is not documented in the same detail as the novel's in any of the published summaries, and the ending arrives quickly for the amount of plot that has to be closed. Viewers who have followed for two weeks get their answer, but they get it at speed.

The episode drew 7.59 million viewers, the highest figure of the first series, which suggests that the two-part structure did its job even if it tested patience along the way. It is a solid conclusion to an uneven story, and it establishes the show's habit of running parallel cases and then pulling them together — a device it would use with more confidence, and more discipline, in the years that followed.