Aidan Turner, possessor of the naked-while-scything torso in Poldark that felled a generation of viewers, is back. This time, he is in The Suspect (ITV), an adaptation of Michael Robotham’s 2004 novel of the same name. He plays the clothed psychologist Dr Joseph O’Loughlin and is in possession of a beard so impressive that I suspect it may have required planning permission.
O’Loughlin is a conscientious professional who is just starting to come to terms with a recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. He has a loving family, good friends and colleagues, a publishing deal for a book about sex workers and – after he saves the life of a young patient preparing to jump from the 10th floor of the hospital where O’Loughlin works – a media profile as a hero.
Thus, when the police find the body of a woman in a graveyard who they think may have been a sex worker, they call him in to lend his expertise. Veteran officer DI Vince Ruiz (Shaun Parkes) and up-and-comer DS Riya Devi (Anjli Mohindra) believe that she was forced to stab herself shallowly 20 times before a fatal 21st blow was administered either by her or by the killer.
This is a bugbear: if I could get rid of the sense that at least 15% of the effort put into most crime dramas goes into thinking up innovatively vile ways for the (usually female) victims to die, I would probably enjoy them 20% more.
Anyway, the first sign that the good doctor may not be all he seems is that he does not immediately tell them that he has a very disturbed patient under his care – Bobby (played by Bobby Schofield). Bobby has an obsession with the number 21 and is awaiting sentencing for violently assaulting a woman after she jumped a cab-rank queue.
The second sign is that he sneaks back into the morgue after the police have shown him the corpse, strokes the victim’s arm and whispers to her about how sorry he is. When Ruiz and Devi see him entering the room on CCTV, he tells them he was checking for self-harming scars. They decide not to share any more information about the case with him.
This proves to be wise, as doubts about O’Loughlin pile up increasingly fast. One of the applications, which he has failed to look through in a timely fashion, for the role of receptionist at the doctor’s private practice is from the victim, now identified as Catherine McCain, an X-ray technician. He shreds it.
When the police search McCain’s digs in Liverpool, the victim’s flatmate (who tells them he is the X-ray technician; she was a community nurse, which is the kind of detail well-trained thriller viewers will duly note) mentions that McCain was often depressed, but planning to move to London to be near the lover she would never tell him anything about.
Meanwhile, in London, O’Loughlin pitches up at the station to inform them, before they discover it themselves and it looks a bit suspicious, that he was in the graveyard – commemorating his mother’s death – when the body was reported and the police arrived. He doesn’t yet know that Devi is travelling back from Liverpool with a sheaf of medical notes in her hand proving that McCain was his patient. But he soon will, because Ruiz and Devi pitch up at his home that night to tell him and his wife all about it – and recap McCain’s allegations of sexual assault against him.
It is all great, well-acted fun – and shaping up very satisfactorily. It promises to be meaty enough to justify its five-part length. Turner does a particularly good job of holding the two possible sides of O’Loughlin – gentle therapist to criminals, or student of them for his own nefarious purposes? – in balance. There are times when Parkes, as Ruiz, brings such a strange energy to the part – almost like the spirit of an ancient member of the fae is moving through him – that he seems to belong in another production (Neil Gaiman should bear Parkes in mind for his next project). But it is not quite enough to disrupt the otherwise polished proceedings that work a notch above the purely formulaic. And we still have Sian Clifford (as the friend and colleague O’Loughlin is due to walk down the aisle) to be fully unleashed. It will see us through the transition into autumn chills very nicely indeed.
