Time Out

A prostitute named Kim walks into the station and tells Kersey that one of her clients confessed to murder. Three nights earlier, he told her, he killed another woman who worked the same streets. Kersey is sceptical, and who could blame him. Girls like Kim get listened to about as often as they get believed.

But the evidence starts pointing somewhere specific. James Lassiter is a neighbour of Wycliffe's, a man acquitted of a sex crime in the past and logged as a kerb crawler since. He stays in the frame while the case takes a darker turn: a regular user of prostitutes hangs himself by a local lake, and when they dredge the water, they find Mrs. Lassiter's corpse. The man's death is ruled a suicide, but nothing about it feels tidy.

The family story underneath is the strangest part. Lassiter knew his wife was obsessed with playing at being a prostitute, and he played along to please her. That detail turns the investigation from a hunt for a killer into something closer to an autopsy of a marriage. Wycliffe's own household is quieter: Helen and Ruth drift through the edges, the domestic life that grounds him.

Elsewhere, Lucy Lane is getting back together with Angus, the journalist ex-lover, a subplot that sits oddly next to a drowned body and a hanged man. It's a lot for one episode to carry, and not all of it lands. But the central mystery holds.

Written by W.J. Burley and Peter Hammond, directed by Alan Wareing. Jack Shepherd as Det. Supt. Wycliffe, Jimmy Yuill as DI Kersey, Pauline Turner as Kim, John Flanagan as Lassiter, John Vine as Raymond King, Lynn Farleigh as Helen Wycliffe, Charlie Hayes as Ruth Wycliffe, Gerard Horan as DS Caplin, Cristian Solimeno as DC Hall and Helen Masters as DI Lane.