A public servant’s life takes a dark and comic turn when she agrees to help a wealthy stranger cover up a suspicious death.
Working as a waitress at a private party, Marcey (Sophie Okonedo) returns late at night to the home of affluent businessman Greg (Michael Kitchen) to retrieve her forgotten handbag. She discovers him standing over a dead body. Greg insists the man’s death was a tragic accident, but fearful of the consequences, he persuades the pragmatic Marcey to help him dispose of the body.
Their frantic cover-up becomes dangerously complicated when it emerges the deceased was having an affair with Greg’s wife, Linda (Phyllis Logan), giving Greg a clear motive for murder. As Marcey is drawn deeper into Greg’s panicked deceptions, she must contend with his suspicious friends and family while questioning whether she is helping an innocent man or abetting a killer.
Writer Paul Abbott constructed this two-part thriller as a darkly comic character study, built around the mismatched partnership of its two protagonists. The plot functions less as a traditional mystery and more as an examination of how ordinary people confront an extraordinary moral crisis. All the tension and black humour stem from the escalating absurdity of the central deception. Greg’s neurotic incompetence is a perfect foil for Marcey’s streetwise resourcefulness, and the drama is driven by the peculiar, codependent bond that forms between them under extreme pressure. The production spins a conventional thriller premise into an unpredictable story of misplaced loyalty and strange alliances.
Broadcast: ITV, 2 Episodes, 25 August – 26 August 2003
Written by: Paul Abbott
Director: David Richards
Producer: Judith Hackett
Executive Producers: Paul Abbott, Eileen Quinn
Main Cast: Michael Kitchen (Greg), Sophie Okonedo (Marcey), Phyllis Logan (Linda), Hilary Maclean (Steph), Adam Kotz (Danny), Sadie Shimmin (Wendy), Tom Knight (Martin), Jerome Willis (Stan)
