Down Cemetery Road Recap: Blood Lines
How long can Zoë pursue the mystery of Joe’s death until she gets into serious trouble? So far, everyone who has gotten involved with the Singleton house explosion is either missing or dead, including Sarah Trafford. It turns out that the Stranger is called Downey, and he killed Axel Crane and took Sarah in his not-at-all creepy gray van. At the first opportunity, Sarah runs from him, but he tackles and points a gun at her before deciding to let her make her choice. She can either get back in the van or let herself be caught by “them,” the people who intend to kill her. So she gets back in the van. While she’s at it, she might as well get an answer from Downey: Who is “they”?
They, we know, is the Ministry of Defense; more specifically, what seems to be its Murder Department. The person sent to clean up Axel’s death is his own brother, Amos, who makes it seem like nothing ever happened, except he couldn’t have known that the bathroom’s doorknob was broken before Sarah tried to hang on to it for dear life. When Zoë notices that it has been fixed, after forcing her way into Sarah’s house, she knows someone has been in there. She was looking for Sarah after identifying Axel as Joe’s killer. It occurred to her when she went to buy cigarettes next door that the store was protected by cameras. Mal, the owner, was inclined to indulge his police-procedural fantasies by looking at the CCTV footage, which shows Axel coming out of Joe’s office and into the store. Sarah, of course, already knows that Axel killed Joe, but she didn’t have the chance to tell Zoë that.
Finding Sarah’s house empty, Zoë meets Wigwam instead, who turns up looking for her friend. My theory that Wigwam is a government agent undercover kind of comes apart in her reaction to Sarah and Rufus’s disappearance. She so needs to find out what’s going on; she breaks her rule of never speaking to the police, “patriarchal misogynists” that they are, to speak with Zoë, who pretends to be a cop looking into Joe’s death. The night before, Wigwam fell asleep after putting the kids to bed and didn’t notice Rufus hadn’t returned until morning. In Wigwam’s kitchen, Zoë spots a photo of Axel — whom Wigwam identifies as Rufus — on the fridge. That he simply appeared in Wigwam’s life, out of nowhere, and that his main job was “juggler,” only corroborates evidence of his sliminess. Zoë tells Wigwam to get herself and her kids out of there, and to call her if Sarah gets in touch.
At the short end of this mysterious stick is Malik. This week, he gets his ass handed to him by both his unnamed boss, C, and his subordinate, Amos Crane, whom he fires or at least tries to. The Cranes’ unorthodox methods have shed too much unnecessary blood — including their own — so Malik is instructed to get Amos off the case. After cleaning up the crime scene, Amos buried his brother. He cried, though it was unnatural for him to do so. When Malik tells him he is off the case in order to avoid getting any more people killed, he knocks Malik out of his chair before he can finish saying “permanent grief leave.” Amos promises to find Downey, whether or not it’s his official duty to do so.
Downey is the key to the whole conspiracy, but he doesn’t seem very inclined to start speaking. He is not the least bit threatened when Sarah points a shaky gun swiped from the van’s dashboard at him, demanding to know who he is and where he’s taking her. All he tells Sarah is that he’s been following her because he is also looking for Dinah, and that “they” are more powerful than “any of us,” and that if “they” discover where Sarah and Downey are, it’s game over for all of them, including Dinah. For her part, Zoë knows that solving Sarah’s disappearance will get her closer to Joe’s death, but the local police are not interested in pursuing her leads. She pitches the officer in charge her theory that Axel bombed the Singletons, killed Joe, and disappeared Sarah. She gives him the cap he wore the night of Joe’s murder, which she took from Wigwam’s house, but he ignores her pleading.
Either way, Zoë isn’t waiting around for the police’s approval to take matters into her own hands. Digging deeper, she uncovers a betrayal. When Sarah first came into Joe’s office, Zoë mock-wondered if she was looking for someone to investigate her husband’s affair with his secretary. Sarah mocked back that this kind of thing hardly existed anymore. As it turns out, Zoë was right: Trailing Mark into his office, she captures a video of him kissing his assistant, Emma, as they come back in from their lunch break. I knew there was something fishy about Mark’s untimely sleepover in London, though nothing could have prepared me to hear Emma call him “sex god” (that guy?!). Zoë’s tactic to get Mark to collaborate is to grill him in the middle of his open-plan office. Once he agrees to talk in a more private room, Zoë tells him that Sarah is missing. She wants him to file a missing person’s report so that the police will be obligated to look into it. To make sure he does it, Zoë shows him the video she got of him and Emma.
But the video will be no use as blackmail, because Sarah finds out about Mark’s cheating herself. You can never underestimate a man’s ability to ruin a woman’s day, even when she is embroiled in a life-threatening government conspiracy. At a gas station, Sarah uses her wit to steal a phone from another customer. In the bathroom, she calls Mark, who she expects to be out of his mind with worry about her. When he picks up, she hears Emma’s voice suggest: “It’s probably a cold caller, hon, just hang up.” But he doesn’t hang up, only puts his phone down, so Sarah hears him tell Emma that she has apparently gone missing, with nary a trace of anxiety in his voice. Emma offers that maybe Sarah finally left their marriage. Mark laughs: “That’d be a result,” then asks her to book them dinner. Sarah would be justified to go Axel Crane on his ass and see if she can hang him with the assistant.
Meanwhile, in the van, Downey takes a pill from a bottle labeled “Histropine.” In London, C takes a meeting with a man called Isaac, who reassures him that Singleton’s death has been squared away. All the evidence from the blast has been destroyed, and his body, which was registered as a John Doe, has been removed from the morgue. This means that what Wigwam told Sarah about Maddie’s husband being dead can’t be true — how can a man die twice? When C asks what Singleton’s state was prior to the explosion, Isaac says that he must have been suffering severely from nerve damage, which could only be alleviated by the use of Histropine. “Without his pills, his days were numbered,” Isaac says, assuring C that Downey won’t make it much longer than his own stock, which can’t be easily refilled at any random pharmacy.
As if she could hear the echoes of foul play in the rarefied halls of power, Zoë decides to snoop around the morgue. Asking the attending clerk, Wayne, to see Joe’s body, she does a little act with a hint of truth about how she didn’t get the chance to say good-bye. But she doesn’t even open Joe’s body bag — instead, she looks through the other drawers. Maddie Singleton is there, but the drawer labeled “John Doe” is, as expected, empty. On her way out, Zoë talks to Wayne about the importance of chasing your dreams. It’s her way of implying that Wayne should do more with his life than letting people get away with shit at the morgue, even if his notion of “doing more” is being a full-time live-streamer. She leaves him with her card.
Zoë’s main strength as an investigator is her ability to open people like padlocks, pulling the information she needs from them by aiming directly at their insecurities. It’s part of her tendency to “do what’s unexpected,” as Joe’s mother, Janice, puts it. But in the face of cold, hard facts, she’s still in the dark. What she knows is this: Before he died, Joe uncovered the information that eight soldiers were court-martialed in 2021, after Britain’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Three months later, they all supposedly died in a helicopter crash, including Tommy Singleton, Maddie’s husband. Then, an Oxford house exploded, leaving a dead mother, a missing body, and a disappeared child. She relates all of this to her Irish paramour when he comes by to “offer his condolences” about Joe. He wonders if, being part of the Metropolitan Police Department, or “the Met,” he might be able to help her. But when she gets to Singleton’s name, he warns her to drop it before she gets hurt. Zoë goes berserk. Through the window, she throws a TV on his car.
Galvanized, Zoë goes to see Wayne. She asks if he saw the John Doe who got brought in, and if that’s him on Maddie Singleton’s Facebook profile picture. Wayne confirms it’s him not only by sight, but by showing her that his dreams are, indeed, alive — he has randomly written his own facial-recognition software on his work computer and runs a search on Tommy Singleton’s face, turning up a picture of the battalion he was in on a website called Veterans Reunited. So, it’s confirmed: Tommy Singleton did not die in a helicopter crash; he died when his house was bombed. Also in the Veterans Reunited photo is Downey, who is, at that moment, in a hotel room with Sarah, being gentlemanly and letting her take the bed while he takes the chair.
Sarah finds Joe’s card in her pants pocket. She waits until Downey has gone into the shower to call Zoë. But Zoë is busy having tea with Janice, who wants help planning Joe’s funeral, so she ignores the calls. Zoë tells Janice that Joe didn’t kill himself and that she is looking for the people who murdered him. She slides Janice a manila envelope with a number, instructing her mother-in-law to call it and hand them the envelope in the event she doesn’t hear from Zoë. From Joe’s old bedroom, where she intends to spend the night, Zoë dials back the number that has been calling her phone. Sarah picks up on the first ring.
Paper Trail
• Did Malik seriously think those two doofuses he hired to hang out at Dinah’s cottage could hold Amos back? Amos literally laughs at the way the two “heavies” threaten him with a taser. Amos stops by with Dinah’s teddy bear, though it’s obvious that what he’s really doing is scoping out the situation before going rogue. He calls Axel’s phone, which he correctly guesses Downey took with him, to no avail.
• It emerges, during C’s meeting with Isaac, that the boss has a boss — defense minister Talia Ross, clearly despised.
• Sarah notices Downey has scars up and down his arms, which seem to be related to the nerve damage Isaac mentioned. Together with the court-martial and the Ministry of Defense’s involvement, it’s all smelling of something that rhymes with Schwar Scrimes.
• As the tension ramps up, we have three different races happening at once: Zoë’s race to catch up to the conspiracy; Downey and Sarah’s race to get to Dinah; and Amos’s race to get to Downey and Sarah. I’m already excited to see how the show will pull off the convergence of all of these races without causing another huge explosion.
• Also … Gerard? I’m still not convinced of his innocence.
• So far, the precedent has been set that every week C will deliver one indelible assessment of the situation. This week’s: “The stinking river of dysentery you call an operation just keeps on shitting.” Come on! It sings.