Unforgotten S5: The desiccated corpse snagged up a chimney
It’s initially thought the corpse died about 60 years ago but then there’s a twist that makes the detectives crack open this cold case.
Unforgotten, one of the best TV crime shows featuring the investigation of historical murders, criminal inquiries that have reached a dead end without resolution has – a little unexpectedly – returned for a fifth season.
It features a couple of stolid, professional cops who do things by the book in some tightly plotted stories, their jobs the only unusual thing about them. Unlike so many TV cops, they are not bitter and lonely behind a veneer of sarcasm or disturbed to a point of near hysteria by the murders they attempt to solve.
And as always there is a ticking clock element to the narrative in this series as the detectives hunt down perpetrators who must face the existential dilemma of something in their past that they have tried to bury for many years suddenly being discovered.
The series was created and written by Chris Lang, who was responsible for more than 120 hours of prime-time British TV drama, including staples such as The Bill, Casualty and The Knock, before creating his first original drama in 2000, The Glass, starring John Thaw and Sarah Lancashire. In 2015 he created Unforgotten, which has won many awards and critical acclaim, inspired to some extent by the notion of the so-called cold case investigation.
He was intrigued by the way there is so much life to unpick between the original crime and its eventual discovery.
He was fascinated, he says, as he watched several cases unfold in British courts, at the way “the building blocks” of a life could be dismantled in so short a time and destroyed by the secrets and lies blown apart by an investigation.
And what Lang does so effectively is to make a very human drama of the process of inquiry without undercutting the power of the mystery that lies at the end. He presents in sharply observed detail seemingly random characters and events – he’s a cunning master of parallel plotting – and somehow ties them together into a plausibly powerful concluding focus. And as he does so, his investigating characters become increasingly emotionally involved in the lives they are forced to overturn as they struggle to restore some order. Since the hit drama debuted, a team of persistent and committed cold case Met detectives led by DCI Cassandra “Cassie” Stuart, played by Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar’s DI Sunil “Sunny” have been solving complex historical murders.
There has been a missing teenage boy’s skeleton discovered in a house demolition, a liquefied body found in a suitcase, and human remains picked up by workmen repairing the MI motorway, finally identified by a metal plate fitted on a fracture.
The cases are eventually solved not by detectives with any kind of transcendent powers but through painstaking police work, using emphatic observation and forensic science.
The crime has left behind its mysterious clues and the investigators become involved in such a way that’s not simply determining who the guilty person is but of shaping their own moral position.
These cops care about the dead and through the series this takes its toll on them, especially Cassie. Their last case was the investigation of the decapitated corpse of a Millwall football club fan discovered in a freezer on a rubbish collection site after a house clearance. Mutilated post-mortem to aid disposal, the deceased appeared to have been dead for about 30 years and stored in a domestic freezer.
Initially though Cassie Stuart was depressive and truculent about returning to the job after a period of not working. “Do I seem angry all the time,” she mutters at Bhaskar as the investigation gathers momentum. She had found solace in a new relationship but life was difficult with her grown son who had moved back in with her. And her father was suffering from early dementia. So reluctantly she joined Sunny Kahn for what turned out to be a final case.
While she was on leave for a year she requested medical retirement and discovered she was just months from qualifying for her full police pension. She agreed to return in order to access the full amount of her pension.
“She was at an age where she’d done it for 30 years, and she’d had enough,” says Lang. “And I always thought that was a really interesting dynamic – to have a hero cop who didn’t want to do the job anymore.”
But her tragic demise shocked us all. DCI Stuart was suddenly killed when she was T-boned by a stolen car driven by a 24-year-old while emerging at a junction.
As the fifth season starts it’s months since her death. It’s taken a while for someone permanent to emerge after a couple of replacement DCIs had not worked out, which is understandable given the depth of grief Stuart’s passing has had on her colleagues. (Sunny still visits her grave with flowers, the headstone reading, “She longest lives, who most to others, herself forgetting.”)
She’s DCI Jessica “Jessie” James, played initially at least by a spiky Sinéad Keenan, who is a little truculent on her first day after learning her husband Steve, a construction boss, is having an affair. He leaves her with two young sons as he goes off on some sort of business trip, promising to ring. “I literally start my new job in 54 minutes,” she tells him, with a police officer’s precision. “How could you do this?”
She’s devastated; his number on her phone contacts bears the affectionate inscription “My Gorgeous Hubby”.
Meanwhile Sunny, that trusty backpack seldom absent from his shoulder, and the team have begun to investigate the discovery of a tiny, desiccated corpse initially snagged up a chimney. It has been found by workmen at the renovation of a once handsome mansion at 64 Waterman Rd, Hammersmith. The body, after a cursory examination by Dr. Balcombe (Georgia Mackenzie), turns out not to be a child but that of a skinny woman aged between late 20s and early 40s bearing a caesarean scar.
But when the new boss is told the corpse died about 60 years ago, in another historical murder, she orders the case closed. Sunny is furious, more so when she tells him she plans to steer the squad away from cold case murders, believing it’s a waste of available resources. The latest discovery is now “off the books” despite Sunny’s reluctance to abandon it.
“This isn’t therapy, DI Khan,” she snaps.
Then it’s discovered the woman died no more than six years ago and the case is back on. Lang sets up four very different suspects, who are seemingly unconnected to the murder but inevitably implicated as the story unfolds.
The new season is again directed by Andy Wilson who has directed all of the episodes of the series. Wilson takes almost documentary-style approach in which much of the action is shot in close-up, lending a kind of talking heads rigour about his coverage.
He doesn’t care for trick angles and hates the laziness of cryptically significant shots. “You try to remove yourself as a director from what the actors are doing, so that the audience is simply looking at the actors and reading the story,” he says. He calls his approach with the camera, “Just watching acting.”
And the acting is mesmerising. Baskar is especially riveting as he just holds his grief in check – he’s still ordering two coffees at the nearby snack wagon when he arrives at work – and his professional disdain for the lack of empathy in his new colleague.
There’s wonderful confrontation when James pointedly asks if he had in fact applied for her job. “No, but they offered it to me, multiple times,” he says. “In fact, they f..king begged me.”
Unforgotten, BBC First, streaming on Foxtel