Spoiler alert: this recap contains details about the fourth episode of River, which is shown on BBC1 on Tuesday nights.
There is no distracting subplot this week. Episode four is all about Stevie’s murder and a series of new revelations leading from the discovery of that picture of her outside Crystal Kebabs, cupping the face of a mystery man.
We are initially supposed to think that they were lovers, but by the episode’s end, as poor Haider (the man in question) lies dead on the library floor, we know that he was a happily married man and Stevie was helping him. Or rather, he was helping her, but with what?
River swings wildly from guilt over not being able to give Stevie the kind of love she wanted from him, to wishing he could hold on to her somehow. “I’m losing her,” he says desperately to Rose when he bumps into her by the lifts.
Tonight’s new manifest is Haider, but a version of him that River imagines before he finds out he wasn’t in a relationship with Stevie after all. The imaginary friends are so useful in releasing the often uncomfortable thoughts River has as he discovers more about his late partner.
If they aren’t all dead people, they usually end up dying, foreshadowing doom and casting a constant, looming shadow of dread over the story.
River’s frank talk with Stevie while sitting in the blue Mondeo at the car pound goes some way to explaining their complicated relationship. “You’re jealous,” she says flatly. He denies this, to Stevie and to Rosa in their session later that day.
Stevie says that “sex is an itch” and River seems to be about to say that he would have offered her the necessary scratch, but he doesn’t. When Chrissie later tries to kiss him while plastered and is rebuffed, she tells River: “She said you’d do that” – signalling that Stevie has either tried to kiss River herself or just knew not to.
River, concerned for young Frankie, gives him a couple of hundred quid, saying it is from his sister. But what is he doing with the rest of the 10 grand? Do his superiors know about the money? I’m guessing not.
The scene at Chrissie’s house when we finally meet her husband, Tom (the excellent Michael Maloney), immediately set alarm bells ringing because you don’t hire Maloney to pop up occasionally as a main character’s husband. With a single look in the kitchen, he is established as someone with a roving eye (the au pair), who likes a drink and smokes the odd joint in the garden. Which would be fine, but he’s a judge.
That scene on the street outside his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, when River calls the unidentified number on Stevie’s burner phone and Tom pulls a ringing phone from his pocket, turned the plot on its head. Stevie and Tom: another suspected affair, or were they up to something else involving the unfortunate Somalian families?
“Find your way through your chaos. Otherwise, how will you ever find me?” says Stevie as River sits, drunk, at the kitchen table. He is still lost as to who Stevie was, particularly after that revelation about Tom. And what is Tom going to do now he knows someone has found Stevie’s secret phone? Surely this puts him on high alert if he was up to no good. Does River go straight to Chrissie with this information? I bet he doesn’t.
Reliable as ever, after River’s psych session in which he talks fondly about his early life with his grandmother in Sweden, the Lambeth Poisoner turns up to burst that bubble. “What was it she called you? ‘Idiot’?” he gloats, as River swats the air around him. River can’t get away with anything because a manifest is always there, for good or bad, to keep him in check.
Following River’s dash to the library only to find Haider murdered, the dead man, like the other manifests, sits on the back seat as River drives away, talking to him about the loneliness of migrating to a strange country. River as alien, the stranger in a strange land, is a big theme tonight. He knows how it feels to be alone in an unfamiliar place, and you can see in his eyes that it’s chilly.
“Where do we go now?” says Ira later that night, putting his hand on River’s shoulder. I am jumping up and down in my chair and yelling: “The CCTV from the library. The CCTV from the library!”
We end the episode, as always, with Stevie and River. He is outside Rosa’s group-therapy session, looking through the window. Stevie is beckoning at him from inside. He goes to her; we remain outside and don’t hear what is said, but Rosa looks pleased to see him.
With the 70s floor-fillers a distant memory, tonight’s credits roll to Paul McCartney’s Maybe I’m Amazed, sung by an unidentified female vocalist. Anyone?
If you’re in need of cheering up, here is a recording purported to be of a very tiny Bjork singing I Love to Love. Works for me.
