Summary
Down Cemetery Road delivers its first big moment in “A Kind of Grief”, ending with a fun twist that turns the narrative on its head a bit.
Being told your husband is dead is probably quite hard to take at the best of times, but finding out while you’re having an affair with another man likely carries an additional pang of guilt. Then again, it was quite obvious in the premiere of Down Cemetery Road that Zoe Boehm and Joe Silvermann’s marriage wasn’t exactly conventional. But that premiere was largely about Sarah. Episode 2, “A Kind of Grief”, shifts that focus, or at least expands it, to take in more of Zoe’s perspective as well. And, for what it’s worth, it’s Zoe whom the Mick Herron novels this show is based on are named after.
On the subject of questionable marriages, I don’t think Sarah’s union with Mark is especially enviable either. He’s remarkably unsympathetic about the fact that his wife stumbled on a dead man. He’s literally more bothered about a scarf belonging to Gerard’s wife, because it’s expensive and she left it at their house, and, if Sarah gets it dry-cleaned — in her grief — returning it will be a good pretense on which to visit the Inchons’ expansive Cotswolds home.
Nipping out to clean the scarf leads Sarah back to the now-empty Oxford Investigations office, where she’s pulled by a sense of guilt or morbid curiosity or God-knows-what. Unexpectedly, Amos is waiting there, and he gives her a fairly stern warning to keep her nose out. Whether he really is a policeman or simply posing as one is, at this point, anyone’s guess, but he isn’t the agent who keeps making “field decisions” to kill civilians. That particular nutjob is identified later as Axel, Amos’s younger brother. But Amos is certainly on the payroll.
It’s a lot for Sarah to take in. She already feels like she’s unravelling before Wigwam starts using her therapy voice, and certainly before they run into the mother and young girl in the street who Sarah had seen on the day of the explosion — the mother and young girl she thought were Maddie and Dinah. As it turns out, she has been looking for the wrong girl, which sends her reeling. But to be fair to Sarah, we see Dinah in the next scene in the safehouse where she’s being babysat by Amos and Steph, a nurse from the hospital, and she does look a lot like the kid.
As of Down Cemetery Road Episode 2, Zoe is at least on the case. And that includes digging into Sarah’s past, which features an odd event when she was in college at Oxford, when she tried to fly by throwing herself off the roof of a building under the influence of hallucinogens. She survived that, evidently long enough to consider repeating the event in adulthood, since that’s where Zoe finds her after she spirals. They still don’t have much of a case between them. But it’s nonetheless pretty obvious that something’s amiss, since the gas mains serving Dinah’s house had been shut off by the council years ago, so the explosion had to have been deliberate.
It’s the scarf again that yields another breakthrough. There’s a bloodstain on it that, based on Sarah’s recollections, must have come from the doorknob in Joe Silvermann’s office. If he killed himself at his desk, why would his blood have been all the way over there? She takes it to the police, which immediately alerts Hamza that she’s still looking into the matter despite Amos’s warning. Drastic measures are required. Axel needs to get domestic, if he’s capable of anything quite so low-key.
The fake-out that “A Kind Of Grief” pulls off at the end of the episode is the show’s first big moment, and it works mightily well. The assumption is that Axel is the guy who has been following Sarah around, whom she spotted at the hospital trying to see Dinah, and who almost ran her over outside. But he’s not Axel. In a fun twist, Axel is Rufus, Wigwam’s helpful, caring, hippie partner. His offer to babysit Sarah when she thinks an intruder has just been lurking around her house is really a way to get her on her own so he can finish her off. They get a little tipsy, and Sarah shares her suspicions about the case, totally oblivious to the fact that she’s reeling off Axel’s own mistakes. He doesn’t give himself away until Sarah finally opens Joe’s invoice, which contains a handwritten note explaining that he was dropping the case, since it was revealing itself to be too extraordinary for an ordinary PI, but advising her to look into who died in the explosion. With that, Sarah’s too close to the truth to remain alive.
But while Rufus/Alex is strangling Sarah to death with a loop of floss, the man who was lurking outside bursts in with a gun, turns to the camera, and shoots.
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