Summary
Emma Thompson’s charisma — and some sharp writing — carry Down Cemetery Road through “Filthy Work”, which is another fun hour.
There are obviously a lot of similarities between Down Cemetery Road and Slow Horses, but there are also a fair few key differences. One of them is pace. Slow Horses was always very tight and lean, whereas Down Cemetery Road is in less of a hurry to get where it’s going, and keener to languish with the locals. You can feel that a lot in Episode 3, “Filthy Work”, which sends Sarah off on an unexpected road trip and mostly trusts Zoe to work through the details at a leisurely clip. Thanks to Emma Thompson’s natural charisma and some sharp writing, this is much more engaging than it sounds.
This hour starts with a big tease about what happened in the previous episode’s cliffhanger, with Amos bleaching the interior of Sarah’s house, repairing her dodgy bathroom door handle, and hacking up an unseen corpse, but before it reveals anything else about that, it follows Zoe as she has a fun interaction with a local shopkeeper named Mal. It’s a nothing scene that only exists for Zoe to identify Axel as Joe’s killer through the shop’s CCTV footage, but it’s a lovely little exchange that a lot of shows wouldn’t have time for. It feels oddly intimate and familiar. It’s easy to like Zoe because, despite her quite hostile demeanour, you can tell that almost everyone she interacts with likes her too.
But she’s a complicated figure. She has no compunctions about breaking into Sarah’s house, which she finds pristine, smelling of bleach, and having undergone recent repairs. But when Wigwam comes knocking, and Zoe coaxes her into a cup of tea by posing as a police officer and matches the photo of “Rufus” on the fridge with the CCTV image of Axel, she makes a point of warning Wigwam that he’s dangerous and she should get herself and the kids out of the way. She might act totally unbothered by everything, but one does get the sense that she’s bothered by most things quite a bit.
As it turns out, Axel is no longer going to be a threat to anyone. The body Amos was cutting up in the cold open was his. This is confirmed later, when we see a tearful Amos burying him in the woods. This latest suburban murder has C at the end of his tether, and he instructs Malik to dismiss Amos from the case. He tries this, and it simply doesn’t work. Amos has gone rogue. He’s on a mission to avenge his brother, which seems fair enough, and he only has one target — a man everyone refers to as Downey.
This, needless to say, is who Sarah is with, albeit reluctantly. He’s the guy who burst into her house and prevented Axel from murdering her by shooting him dead. But one of Downey’s key personality traits, it turns out, is that he doesn’t speak very much, so Sarah doesn’t get a great deal of interest to do in Down Cemetery Road Episode 3. During a brief stop at a gas station, she steals a woman’s phone and uses it to call first Mark — which backfires; she overhears him flirting with his mistress — and later Zoe, who doesn’t answer at first but eventually calls back. When Sarah answers, she’s hiding behind the bed in a hotel room, and Downey is in the shower. This is where the episode ends. None of the clarity we gain in this episode about who Downey is, what his connection to Tommy Singleton might have been, and what kind of conspiracy Sarah might have stumbled into comes from Downey or Sarah.
Fehinti Balogun in Down Cemetery Road | Image via Apple TV+
It’s Zoe who starts to put the pieces together, and some brief snippets of conversation between C and a man named Isaac provide the glue. I’ll give you a brief overview of what we know. Her Late Majesty’s Government authorized something it shouldn’t have. Something bad. It probably had something to do with a battalion of soldiers operating in Afghanistan who were court-martialled and all subsequently died in a suspicious helicopter crash. All, it seems, except Tommy Singleton and Downey. Whatever happened to the soldiers made them very ill, and they were only kept alive through the regular popping of pills that we see Downey swallow in his van while he’s waiting for Sarah to come out of the gas station toilet. Through Malik, the Ministry of Defence hired Amos and Axel to kill Tommy with a bomb made to look like a gas mains explosion. His wife was an unfortunate casualty. He was ruled a John Doe, and his body was removed from the morgue.
Downey — and now Sarah — remains the only loose end, if you don’t count whatever their intentions with Dinah are. Through Zoe’s detective work with Wayne, a wannabe streamer who works at the morgue, she’s able to confirm that the John Doe was Tommy Singleton, and we see in a picture of his former battalion that Downey served with him. She knows that “Rufus” probably planted the bomb, that he killed Joe and made his death look like a suicide, and she suspects that he might have Sarah, too. That’s a pretty good amount of progress for a single episode.
But she’s going deeper down the rabbit hole, and people are noticing. Her fling — what’s the male equivalent of a mistress? — who has thus far remained nameless, I think, works for the Met, and turns up to offer his vigorous condolences for Joe and then warn Zoe off the case. The local police are tight-lipped. Nobody seems to care what’s really going on, since anybody in the know has a vested interest in keeping it quiet. The more Zoe uncovers, the bigger the target she’s painting on her own back. And with Axel dead and Amos having been officially removed from the case, the MoD is planning to bring in someone with a more particular set of skills to take out Downey. Zoe will likely find herself on his hit list.
Not that Amos is giving up either, since he visits Dinah’s safehouse to drop her off a stuffed toy that happens to have a tracker inside. He’s planning on following Dinah wherever she goes. He wants Downey just as much as the MoD does, albeit for different reasons, and at this point it’s mostly a matter of who finds him first. Either way, Sarah and Zoe are going to end up caught in the crossfire.
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