Wow. Episode three of Criminal Record starts with a harrowing scene, featuring a drive-by at a London park on a hot summer’s day. You know the sort of day – ice cream van in the park, kids playing football and parched, discoloured grass. The victim is an innocent nine-year-old boy, and we see him with his head close to being blown off. A really disturbing image.
Hegarty is called into action and he and his pitbull/deputy Kim Cardwell (the always super Shaun Dooley) is charged with getting together a team of volunteers from different elements of the force to help with the investigation. It is, after all, a high-profile, emotive case.
Seeing that Hegarty wants some help, Lencker sees an opportunity to get closer to her foe, to find out more about him and to see him in action. She thinks she’s being sneaky and Secret Squirrel about come on now, this is Daniel Hegarty we’re speaking of here – wizened old, beady-eyed bent copper supreme (Or is he? I still reckon he won’t be as bent as he’s made it.)
So Lencker and Hegarty are together at last. Or are they. I really like Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo’s performances here and you just long for them to share the screen together because that’s when the sparks really fly. But no sooner had they come together, Lencker was accepting an invitation from lawyer Sonia Singh to visit Errol Mathis in the clink. So not only is Lencker working undercover with Singh, she’s now reviewing evidence from that case provided by Singh that could endanger her career, and then she’s off to visit an imprisoned man, which, again, is procedurally suspect. And, of course, despite Singh trying to pull some levers so that Lencker would not be registered for her visit, Hegarty did get to find out about it. Cue close up on his face, eyes simmerng with rage, fork tongue apparently about to flick out.
What he does is quite astonishing. As he operates the command centre as a suspect in the child shooting is being tracked, he sees the armed man approach Lencker. Instead of warning her ahead of time, he waits until the very last minute. Lencker escapes with her life intact, and Hegarty warns his CCTV operator to keep quiet (good to see Welsh actor Steffan Cennydd here).
So Hegarty is bad. Very bad. Or is he? I still wonder why he has his taxi-driving side hustle. And he still has someone living with him, but who? And why did he insist on letting of Errol’s son for drug-dealing offences?
This could get messy.
Paul Hirons
READ MORE: OUR REVIEW OF EPISODES ONE AND TWO
Criminal Record is broadcast in the UK on Apple TV+
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