Thriller makes a welcome return
In the dramatic conclusion to the first series of Australian psychological thriller The Secrets She Keeps (Saturday, BBC1, 9.15pm), Meghan Shaughnessy (Jessica De Gouw) was reunited with her missing baby, Ben.
She fought through lifeshattering events ranging from her husband’s affair to her son’s kidnapping, and came out the other side with her family intact and whole. It was nothing short of a miracle – but even happy endings don’t always last for ever.
We rejoin Meghan two years later, and it’s immediately clear that something bad is happening when we find her covered in somebody’s blood and being held in police custody under suspicion of murder.
The rest of the story unfolds gradually, via flashbacks, leaving us to piece together the events that led her here. And, of course, there’s the other big question that needs answering: who is dead? Meanwhile, Ben’s kidnapper, Agatha Fyfle (Laura
Carmichael), still languishes in a maximum-security psychiatric hospital. So how exactly did she become pregnant?
When Agatha’s secret is revealed and her pregnancy is discovered, it’s a huge bombshell for the institution holding her.
It’s also convinced her more than ever that she needs to somehow find her freedom – if not for herself, then for the sake of her unborn child.
Luckily not everyone is out to get Agatha, though – the unfortunate outsider suddenly gets an unlikely new ally in the form of a passionately invested young podcaster, Lorelei (Miranda Frangou).
The cast from series one all return, with the exception of Michael Dorman, who will be replaced by Todd Lasance as Meghan’s husband, Jack. Interestingly, the first series of the thriller was based on the book of the same name by Australian crime writer Michael Robotham.
The novel, released in 2017, was based on the real-life kidnapping of Abbie Humphries, which happened at Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical centre in 1994. The case saw a woman dressed in nursing clothes take Abbie from her father, ostensibly to give her a hearing test, just hours after she was born.
The ‘nurse’ never returned, and Abbie was missing for a total of 17 days – until a neighbour tipped off police and former dental nurse Julie Kelley was found to have faked a pregnancy before stealing Abbie.