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Forgotten -- A Case to Remember on MYSTERY!
Vengeance and unspeakable crimes converge on a peaceful Cotswolds village in Forgotten, a three-part series airing Mondays, July 1-15, 2002 at 9pm.
The new thriller launches the summer of MYSTERY!, which continues with Ian Richardson in Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes (July 22-August 12) and Elizabeth George's The Inspector Lynley Mysteries: A Great Deliverance (August 19 and 26).
Amanda Burton and Paul McGann (Our Mutual Friend) star as two weary survivors. She, of the brutal killing 20 years earlier of her daughter, whose body was never found. He, of the wrongful conviction -- he claims -- for that very crime.
Ominously, as they confront each other for the first time in two decades, a new child murder investigation is underway -- one that eventually targets each of them as suspects.
Episode 1 opens as Ben (Paul McGann) and Natalie Turner (Zara Turner) are about to celebrate eight years of happy marriage. They live in the sleepy rural town of Brompton-on-the-Water, where Ben has a second-hand bookshop and Natalie runs a bed-and-breakfast out of their home. They are blessed with a beautiful seven-year-old daughter in Emmy (Karis Copp). But their perfect world is about to crack.
One of Emmy's classmates has just gone missing when enigmatic Rachel Monroe (Amanda Burton) books into the B&B. Ben can't quite place her, but she seems very familiar. Arriving at work the next day he finds over a dozen identical letters, all with the same message: What have you done with her body?
While the frantic search for the missing girl goes on around them, Rachel accosts Ben and accuses him of being Peter Baxter, her daughter's killer. Twenty years earlier Baxter was convicted of the crime, though the girl's body was never found. After serving his sentence, he reportedly committed suicide. Rachel threatens to destroy Ben's new life unless he admits his guilt and reveals where her child is buried. Appalled, Ben concedes he is Baxter but professes innocence.
Meanwhile, the missing girl has turned up dead under circumstances suspiciously like the murder of Rachel's daughter. Though they don't yet know Ben is really a convicted killer, police begin to suspect him.
In Episode 2, retired policeman Dexter Allen (Ian Hogg) is drawn into the child murder investigation by its similarity to the Baxter case, which Dexter himself helped solve. For years he has been haunted by the fact that he hid evidence to get a conviction. He now believes Baxter was innocent.
Arriving in Brompton-on-the-Water Dexter encounters Rachel, and he confesses that he framed Baxter. Shocked to hear that she might be pursuing the wrong man, Rachel reveals that Baxter is actually alive and living in town under an assumed name. Dexter now faces the dilemma of exposing Ben's true identity to police and ruining his life a second time or hiding important evidence in the new murder case.
In the gripping conclusion in Episode 3, Ben saves Dexter's life after a confrontation. Dexter now begins to suspect that Rachel is the real killer, since she is acting increasingly psychotic and may have been seeking revenge for her own suffering. Clues point to someone obsessed with symbolism and very cagey about manipulating evidence. Then it emerges that Ben and Natalie's daughter, Emmy, has disappeared while in Rachel's care. Could she be the next victim?
Read an interview with Amanda Burton or Paul McGann.
Introduction | More | Episode Descriptions | Cast & Credits
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