‘It’s like trying to grab hold of fog!”
These are the words of DI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) to DS Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) after yet another frustrating interview with one of the gang of four suspects. She may be frustrated by the poor memories of informants recalling events of nearly 30 years ago, but the same is true of them.
As they try to grab hold of what remains of their lives, each of the four – the entrepreneur, the husband with a secret, the unfaithful priest and the charity worker – finds everyday comfort whisked away in the wind, fading like the fog itself.
Sir Philip Cross (Trevor Eve) is on a charm offensive, admitting a little and hiding lot. This gathers some momentum until his old employers, the Fennicks, demand more money. To back up their demand they provide pictures of a young Trevor Eve driving a nail through a mans hand.
All this as we learn poor Jimmy Sullivan had a nail driven through his hand as a prelude to torture. Faced with this grim evidence and the doubts of his family, Philip Cross’s wife Shirley (Cherie Lunghi) points out the man in the photos was white, not black like Jimmy Sullivan.
“I’m just saying! There’s nothing in these to suggest he had anything to do with killing that lad”
That makes it alright then.
Father Greaves’s life is falling apart even faster. He admits an affair with young JoJo back when he was 28 and only married a year. His daughters reject him and he moves out to a spare room of one of the church. We find out JoJo was 15 at the time, adding to the disgrace.
Liz Wilton (Ruth Sheen) gets arrested for helping her boyfriend rob young Jimmy of £50 and explains her connections to Jimmy to the police. Her understated recitation of facts is all the more haunting for her causal manner as she describes the horrors she engaged in due to drugs and bad company.
Can her more recent work with the charity football project compensate for her deeds? It’s a difficult question.
The life of Eric Slater (Tom Courtenay) is taking longer to collapse. By the time he is celebrating his 45th wedding anniversary his wife wants to leave him (despite her dementia) and we have every suspicion he has been hitting her, despite being wheelchair bound.
We also learn that he assaulted a man in the 1970s when he still had use of his legs, and suddenly an anti-gay theme appears. A red herring? We no longer know. All we know is pieces are starting to fall into place yet the gaps between them look larger than ever. With only two weeks to go, there is plenty more yet to learn about this fascinating group of people.
Meanwhile, there is another victim…
Aired at 9pm on Thursday 29 October 2015 on ITV.
> Order Unforgotten on DVD on Amazon.
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