The Names of Angels

The Names of Angels sets Tony Hill a puzzle that has no precedent in the series: a killer is raping and strangling young women in Bradfield, and then dressing and identifying them as women he killed several years earlier in Europe. He is boasting to the police about a past they cannot verify, he is leaving the bodies where they will be found quickly, and his victims are confident, successful women from the business world.

The first question is why. The second is how — how does an offender operating in Bradfield have a documented history of murders committed abroad, and how is he selecting victims who have no obvious connection to each other? The investigation begins to link the foreign killings to the names of more than one Bradfield businessman, and the ambiguity is the point: those men could be suspects, or they could be further victims caught in the same web. Fielding and Hill have to establish whether the killer really is wealthy and powerful, or whether he is someone with nothing who is stealing other people's lives.

That is a stronger central idea than most of the series manages, and the substitution device gives the crime scenes a genuinely unsettling quality. The episode's difficulty is that its parallel business is thin. Hill is troubled by an eighteen-year-old released killer named Jack Norton turning up on his doorstep, on the run from his social workers and the police, and Fielding discovers that Ben has been secretly in contact with his father but cannot bring herself to ask Hill for help. The resulting misunderstandings are the most stock material in the fifth series, and the Hill strand in particular repeats the returning-offender device the show had used in Bad Seed and would use again far more effectively in 2008.

Jack O'Connell's appearance as Jack Norton is worth noting: the role is small and the performance is already distinctive, and the casting reads very differently now than it would have in 2007. Thematic continuity is also better served here than in its neighbours — the man on Hill's doorstep is a person Hill has already dealt with professionally who has now arrived in his private life, which is the same intrusion the show gives Michael a year later, with far more consequence.

The film's best quality is its refusal to sort the victims from the suspects. Several named businessmen are implicated by the end of the investigation and the episode keeps the audience uncertain about their status, which is a harder thing to sustain than a straightforward list of wronged dead.

It drew 5.16 million viewers. It is a mid-table episode of the fifth series with one genuinely strong mystery and two weak subplots, and its reputation suffers from arriving between the series' most personal film and its most procedural one. Alan Whiting's script is more interested in the puzzle than in the people, and in this instance that is a fair trade.