One Day A Lemming Will Fly

"'One Day A Lemming Will Fly'"
Cracker episode
Episode no.	Season 1 Episode 6 & 7
Directed by	Simon Cellan Jones
Written by	Jimmy McGovern
Original air date	November 1-8, 1993
Episode chronology
← Previous "To Say I Love You" Next → "To Be A Somebody"

One Day A Lemming Will Fly is the third episode of Cracker, divided into two parts. It is the final episode of season one, and also the only episode in which the true criminal is never identified and the police instead intentionally send an innocent man to prison for the crime.

Plot

Part One

Fitz and Judith have reconciled and Judith and Katy have moved back in with Fitz and Mark. While Judith is trying her best to patch things up, Fitz finds it impossible to share a bed with her due to her affair with Graham (from To Say I Love You). Fitz drowns his sorrows in a casino and manages to win quite a bit of money, but is assaulted and mugged once outside by a man who proceeds to take the money back to the casino (implying he was hired by the casino to sabotage genuine winners).

A young boy called Timothy Lang is seen running frantically through a wood, followed by an unseen adult. Later on, a man and a woman struggle briefly in the same wood until they start kissing fiercely. Just as they are about to have sex, they notice Timothy hanging by the neck from a nearby tree. Terrified, they run away. Timothy's family, who have not heard from him for a few hours, call the police. After a press conference twelve hours later, the woman from the couple, Mrs Perry, calls the police anonymously (as she is married and was cheating on her husband) and leads them to Timothy's body. DCI Bilborough and DS Penhaligon break the news to Timothy's family.

Bilborough, himself under stress due to his wife's late pregnancy, angrily berates Mrs Perry for waiting so long to help a dead child and threatens to tell her husband about her affair if she does not tell them who her boyfriend was.

Fitz persuades Cassidy not to kill himself.

She gives his name as Francis Bates, and Bilborough orders DS Beck and Penhaligon to pick both Bates and Fitz up (much to Beck's chagrin). Bates tells Bilborough and Beck that the night they saw Timothy, he had noticed somebody jogging nearby. Bilborough nevertheless screams at Bates for leaving Timothy hanging from the tree and calls him a "bloody animal" for acting against human nature.

Timothy's death is at first considered a suicide, but the pathologist's report reveals that Timothy was actually strangled to death and the hanging was staged to make it look like a suicide. This revelation causes almost everyone connected with Timothy to feel as if they are responsible. As Fitz interviews Timothy's parents, Timothy's father admits to Fitz that he would have preferred it to be suicide, as it would be a brave decision Timothy made himself, while Timothy's mother says that she prefers it to be murder, as Timothy would not commit suicide and therefore drop such a huge emotional bomb on his family. Timothy's elder brother, Andy, reacts to his feelings of guilt by attacking one of Timothy's classmates, Tom, who had bullied Timothy for years since Timothy was actually homosexual (and Andy himself had refused to help Timothy at the time). Both Andy and Tom are arrested, and Andy attempts to attack Tom again in the station. Andy is put inside a cell while Beck ferociously chastises Tom for his cheek to bully Timothy and his cowardice to confront Andy (Tom angered Beck by waiting until Andy was conveniently out of earshot to throw an insult at him).

Timothy's teacher, Nigel Cassidy, attempts to commit suicide out of guilt. First, he tries to poison himself by turning the gas taps on inside his flat. When this fails, he considers jumping off the roof of the Ramada Hotel. Fitz and Penhaligon arrive and Fitz tricks Cassidy into grabbing hold of him, thus pulling him away from the edge. Fitz and Penhaligon interrogate Cassidy while leading him through a shopping centre, and come to the conclusion that Cassidy might be Timothy's killer. Cassidy is arrested, but an angry mob of parents outside the police station prevents them from entering and they begin rocking the car in an attempt to reach and kill Cassidy.

Part Two

Penhaligon calls for backup and several officers emerge to push the crowd away. Bilborough speaks severely to the largest two of the crowd and threatens to arrest them if they break the law again. Cassidy's girlfriend, Leslie, is brought in for questioning, as Cassidy claims he was with her the night Timothy died. Leslie backs this up, but Fitz, Penhaligon and Beck do not believe her. Beck tries to sway her over by suggesting Cassidy might be gay, but it only works after Penhaligon warns her of the consequences of being found out. Finally, she admits she was not with Cassidy. Cassidy, meanwhile, tells Fitz that he briefly jogged the night of the murder. Francis Bates is brought back to the station to identify the jogger. He notices and recognises Cassidy among the suspects, but only as the man who teaches his son at school, and tells Bilborough that Cassidy was not the jogger he saw. Though skeptical, Bilborough is forced to release Cassidy, who is escorted home by Fitz and Penhaligon. However, Cassidy is attacked at his home by Mr Lang and another father, Lindsay, who hijack a crane and use it to smash Cassidy's flat. Penhaligon calls for backup and Bilborough has them arrested. Bilborough recommends that Cassidy spend the night in a hotel with Fitz and Beck for protection. While alone in the car, Penhaligon shows her affection for Fitz when she asks him to come away with her on holiday for a week. Fitz accepts.

The mob outside the station returns when Bilborough brings in the two fathers and arrests Andy again for blocking his way. The Chief Super, noticing Bilborough acting more and more rashly, angrily orders him to stay in the canteen to calm down (although Bilborough instead finds solitude in the toilet).

At the hotel, Beck remains convinced that Cassidy is Timothy's killer and angrily berates him for his apparent homosexual pedophilia. Fitz counters Beck by suggesting that maybe Beck once thought he might be homosexual when there was a femenine-looking boy he fancied at school, and might even be the reason for his moustache, to prove he is not gay (as moustaches have apparently become a fashion for gay men). Beck furiously denies it, but nonetheless backs off. Fitz turns his attention to the troubled Cassidy, and attempts to crack him into confessing to the murder. Fitz surmises that Cassidy and Timothy were in the woods alone and Cassidy attempted to molest Timothy, who began crying, and out of fear of Timothy telling his mother and then the police, Cassidy strangled Timothy to death and strung him in the tree to make it look like Timothy committed suicide. After Fitz promises to share the burden of the murder of a child, Cassidy finally confesses to the murder, and is taken back to the station to be charged. Meanwhile, Bilborough's wife, Catriona, goes into labour. Penhaligon drives Bilborough to the hospital, where Catriona gives birth to a baby boy, much to Bilborough's relief.

Cassidy drops the bombshell.

The next morning, Fitz and the police prepare to celebrate solving Timothy's murder (including Beck, who has comically shaved off his moustache in response to what Fitz said). Fitz goes to visit Cassidy in his cell one last time before he is charged. Cassidy accuses Fitz of being a hypocrite obsessed with uncovering other people's lies yet remaining a liar himself, although Fitz counters that it is nothing compared to murder. Then, Cassidy drops the final bombshell: he did not kill Timothy.

Although he is not gay, he fancied Timothy because of his femenine appearance. Timothy knew this, and also fancied Cassidy. Timothy visited Cassidy one night and revealed that he was in love with him, but Cassidy, terrified of the consequences of a possible affair, chased Timothy away, and it was the same night Timothy was murdered. Thus, Cassidy was consumed by guilt and he felt responsible for Timothy's death, as had he not frightened him, Timothy might have still been alive. Fitz implores Cassidy to retract his confession so that they can continue the investigation and find the real killer, but Cassidy callously reminds Fitz of his promise to share his burden: if Cassidy is convicted, the killer will be able to strike again and Fitz will have allowed this to happen.

Fitz tells Bilborough of this and implores him to release Cassidy, but he refuses, more concerned with the consequences of having to tell the Chief Super, Timothy's family and the mob outside that he made such a huge mistake. Startled at Bilborough's dishonesty, Fitz walks out, vowing never to work with Bilborough again. Bilborough holds a press conference and announces publicly that they are charging Cassidy with Timothy's murder, apparently with no shred of hesitation or remorse. Beck, on the other hand, appears visibly uncomfortable, but is ordered to remain silent.

As Fitz prepares for his holiday with Penhaligon, he looks out of his window and sees Judith, Mark and Katy together in the garden. Unwilling to lose his family again, he stands Penhaligon up at the airport, and does not answer the phone when Penhaligon phones to tell him he has forgotten their holiday, symbollically severing his ties with the police. With a clear conscience, Fitz joins his family in the garden.

Cast

• Robbie Coltrane as Dr. Eddie "Fitz" Fitzgerald
• Christopher Fulford as Nigel Cassidy
• Christopher Eccleston as DCI David Bilborough
• Lorcan Cranitch as DS Jimmy Beck
• Geraldine Somerville as DS Jane "Panhandle" Penhaligon
• Wesley Cook as Timothy Lang
• Tim Healy as Mr. Lang
• Frances Tomelty as Mrs. Lang
• Lee Philip Hartney as Andy Lang
• Barbara Flynn as Judith Fitzgerald
• Kieran O'Brien as Mark Fitzgerald
• Tess Thomson as Katy Fitzgerald
• Edward Peel as the Chief Super
• Geoffrey Hutchings as the Pathologist
• John Graham-Davies as Francis Bates
• Amelia Bullmore as Catriona Bilborough