This Blue Lights season 2 episode 3 recap contains spoilers... Lee Thompson moves fast to fill the gap left by Dixie's death and when the police head to the Mount Eden Estate looking for answers, they find they're even more unwelcome than they thought they would be. Elsewhere, Grace and Stevie attend a heartbreaking case that shows a very different side to life on the beat.
After smooching in the pub the night before, Shane and Annie wake up in bed together, guns casually left next to a pile of clothes on the floor. Annie lives with Grace now and she’s desperate for her surrogate big sister not to find out, but all that goes out of the window when Shane comes downstairs with news that Dixie was shot last night.
At Blackthorn Station, Sgt McNally is calling in back-up from anywhere she can, anticipating plenty of blowback on the Mount Eden Estate. Davy Hamill — the rival gang leader who was goading Dixie following the march — is being questioned.
Out the back of the station, DS Murray Canning lays into Shane. "We’ve a murder on our patch and people are looking at me for something solid and I’ve got f*** all..." he says, threatening to cut off his path to promotion and leave him at Blackthorn if he doesn’t step up.
Meanwhile Jonty is back at the station and Sandra is not pleased to see him. After all it was his poor judgement with Constable Hannah McClean that indirectly led to Gerry’s death. He wrote her a letter, but she hasn’t read it.
At the roadside diner, Tommy meets Aislyn again and tells her about his work with Canning and the paramilitary crime task force. She says that stuff always ends up "messy", although what Tommy’s doing enjoying himself when everyone else is working 12 hour shifts is beyond us.
Before they part ways, Aislyn says Tommy’s district has put out a call for volunteers and she’s thinking of coming to Belfast. He’s delighted at the news. Looks like everyone at Blackthorn is shacking up — apart from Grace and Stevie of course!
'I want to take over the whole supply...'
On the street, Grace and Stevie are doing door-to-doors in the area and getting nowhere fast, but they do have a promising lead on a doorbell camera. They’re then off to a tragic case, where a terminally ill man has died and his husband, Chris, is suspected of giving him an overdose of painkillers to ease his suffering.
Stevie doesn’t want to, but Grace says they have no choice but to report it as a suspicious death. It turns out that Stevie lost his wife in a similar way and sits with Chris until the CID officers arrive, before reluctantly arresting him in a powerful and poignant scene.
When they get to the station, Stevie encourages Chris to act confused and exhausted in the interview, hoping he might be able to persuade the investigators he made an honest mistake with his partner's dosage.
When Chris leaves, it makes Stevie realise that he needs to part ways with Grace as he couldn’t bear to lose her and suffer the pain he went through when his wife died! We’re totally not crying, you are.
Lee Thompson and Craig McQuarrie head to a meeting Tina McIntyre has set up with the Dubliners. "I want to take over the whole supply," he tells them. It’s clear they want to use Lee, but tell him he’s going to need more resources and lend him the money to boost his operation fast. However he’ll need to pay them back double in a month.
Meanwhile at the station Davy Hamill is denying he had any role in the death of Dixie, when his solicitor gets a call from 'T Mac', the Dubliner who’s currently eyeing up Lee. It’s an event that doesn’t go unnoticed by Jonty. The solicitor then returns to the interview room and walks out on a shocked Davy Hamill, "I’m going to have to recuse myself," he says before leaving very quickly.
'It was all about protecting the source..'
Across town Hannan McClean has received a call from former RUC Special Branch officer, Robin Graham. He says he can’t talk about what happened back then, because he sued the government and was threatened with prison for violating the official secrets act. However McClean knows it was him who redacted the files relating to the chip shop bombing and that he probably knows who did it.
Eventually Graham opens up and says that when the bomb went off, he had a source who told him there would be an attack somewhere, but he did nothing. He says his source’s associates suspected him and if the police had stopped the attack, he'd have been killed. “It was all about protecting the source. I ran that source for 20 years after that and he saved lives, a lot of lives...” he explains, before explaining that his superiors also knew about the expected bombing and did nothing.
Hannah shares the news with Happy, whose father and brother died in the bombing, yet her boss isn’t pleased with her for letting him believe she’ll get him answers as the government is in the process of shutting down cases looking into the past. "We’ve made the deadline though?" she replies. "This case could be one of the last of its kind."
'It's up to us to fix it...'
When Jonty runs a neighbourhood meeting, Lee Thompson shows up to ask why the police haven’t been doing anything about Dixie and Davy Hamill until now."“Jim Dixon was nothing but a scumbag paramilitary," he says, to the great concern of his sister Mags. “I’ve been paying him protection money for years and I know many others are in the same position,” he continues. "You knew and you did nothing. You coming here is an insult to this community!" he tells Jonty. "It’s up to us to fix it. They don’t stop paramilitaries, they work with them."
Meanwhile, with no leads on Dixie's murder, the squad line up with a host of Armoured Response Vehicles and get ready to head through the Mount Eden Estate checking cars. When they pull over Robert ‘Rab’ McKendry we learn he received a whole life-term for terror offences and was released under the terms of The Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Shane orders Annie to search the car and is clearly determined to get some information out of Rab, who’s grandson (Henry McKendry?!?!) is getting upset in the backseat. Later on Annie is angry with Shane for pushing Rab.. "do you think we made it worse"” she wonders.
Across town, Sandra picks up Lee’s old pal, Craig McQuarrie, and finds the bag of cash — the one from the Dubliners we presume — in the boot. It’s immediately confiscated, which puts Lee in a very tricky situation, after all he’s only been working with them for a day or two..
Later on Jonty pays Lee a visit at The Loyal Pub. He finds Mags there and she orders him out furiously, although we sense a history between these two. “We’ve lost Mount Eden - maybe we lost it a long time ago,” Jonty tells McNally back at the station, before Lee Thompson turns up asking for his money back. He's got some nerve!
