So here you are because a Karen Pirie series 2 episode 2 recap is an absolute necessity – and we have it all explained in fine detail below.

After the first episode of Karen Pirie series two, you may have thought you had a pretty good handle on what was happening: miner and part-time bouncer Mick Prentice was honey-trapping rich heiress, Cat Grant, so that he and two mates could kidnap her and hold her to ransom. Simps!

Except, no.

Because episode two rapidly becomes an exercise in forgetting everything that you thought you knew. Buckle yourself in for a rollercoaster ride to the ’80s and back. Double denim optional.

*** Warning – spoilers ahead ***

So who was actually behind the kidnapping?

The only way to properly make sense of this is to untangle all those various 1984 flashbacks and place them in chronological order.

Mick and Cat were in a relationship and it was genuine. Mick was not honey-trapping her. Cat seemed intent on pissing off her dad, as her time at art college had made her an anti-capitalist and he stood for everything she hated now.

So Cat and Mick came up with the idea of faking a kidnap. Mick called in his friend (and fellow striking miner) Andy for help.

The plan was to carry out a phoney abduction, hide Cat and baby Adam in Andy’s rundown cottage in the middle of nowhere and then send a ransom note to Sir Brodie, apparently from The Anarchist Covenant of Scotland. This group didn’t actually exist, but it was a deliberate red herring designed to deflect police attention onto the anarchists and radicals Cat mixed with at college.

Read more: Karen Pirie overview including cast details

As they were all planning to escape to a place in the sun, they needed fake passports. Handily Andy knew someone who knew someone… Kevin Campbell.

Kevin had connections to the Lennox crime family, who had their own in-house forger, Bridget Early, Craig Lennox’s ex-wife. He paid her to knock up fake documents for Mick, Andy and himself.

Why one for himself? Because, against Mick’s better judgement, Andy had asked Kevin to assist in the kidnapping too. Mick didn’t trust Kevin to keep his mouth shut (he’s right to worry – we later learn Kevin did blab to his brother Ryan) but didn’t have much choice.

But he only agreed to include Kevin “on one condition. We don’t tell him everything. He only knows what I want him to know”.

So Kevin didn’t know Cat was complicit in the plan – he thought the kidnapping was real.

Karen Pirie series 2 episode 2 recap: So how did the kidnapping start going wrong?

Cat also needed passports for her and baby Adam, but Kevin couldn’t know about that (see above), so Andy asked Bridget to fake them separately. She charged extra for this unusual request.

So everything was ready. Though getting Kevin to perform the actual kidnapping may have been a mistake. Kevin brought a gun (later dubbed by the police Gun 49), which Cat wasn’t expecting and it freaked her out, although she stuck to her role.

He “forces” Cat to drive to Andy’s cottage. Andy stayed”on guard” until Mick arrived. Mick told him to go home and get an alibi, but, on his way out, Kevin overheard Mick talking to Cat and learned the truth.

Furious he’d been kept in the dark, Kevin had a fight with Mick. Then he told Cat that he could go to her dad and earn more money telling Sr Brodie where his daughter was in return for a cash pay-off.

So Cat shot Kevin in the head.

Karen Pirie series 2 episode 2 recap: What’s worse? Kidnapper, murderer or scab?

It’s not clear yet what happened with the kidnappers next, but we know how Mick and Andy were planning to cover up for their absences.

Andy leaves a suicide note while Mick leaves different kind of note for his wife, Jenny, in the tea caddy: “I’m sorry. I’ll send money. Be with him. It’s okay.”

The “him” is another striking miner called Tom Robertson, with whom Jenny is having an affair.

Jenny asks Tom if knows where Mick has gone. Mick says he’s turned scab and gone to work at a pit in Nottingham with four other miners. Disgusted at Mick’s betrayal she doesn’t bother following him and shacks up with Tom instead.

Why did the 1984 investigation go nowhere?

Poor old DI Anderson, he never wins over Brodie and Mary Grant. After advising them not to pay the ransom last episode, he loses all their respect.

Brodie instead leans on the police to make a public appeal on TV, then hijacks the broadcast, offering a £50,000 reward for information. The police switchboards are jammed with informants and DI Anderson is removed from the case.

Read more: Karen Pirie series 1 

Who stole Karen Pirie’s hard drive?

Karen’s first thoughts this episode weren’t about the case but her own career.

Someone had burgled her home and stolen her work laptop and hard drive. It was clear the theft had something to do with the case. But she was more concerned that if Phil reported the theft, anyone checking CCTV footage from he camera outside her house would see she and Phil returned home together. And she’s not supposed to be dating someone on her team.

Phil and Karen fell out over the best course of action and Karen suggested: “Maybe we need to take a pause… Just till the case is over.”

As it turned out, Phil surreptitiously worked on tracking the burglar down throughout the episode (his suspicious-looking actions being noted by Isla, who was still battling with the idea of being a snitch) and Karen lied that she left her laptop and hard drive in her car so no one checked the CCTV (except Phil, who didn’t let her know he was doing it). She got IT to remotely erase the hard drive.

Phil’s secret sleuthing eventually came up trumps when he learned (thanks partly to some bus dash cam footage) the name of the burglar – Cameron Murdoch. The cops arrest Cameron and called him in for interview (but more of that later so we can end on a dramatic flourish).

How did Karen’s team learn the truth about the staged kidnapping?

The team could find no death certificate for Mick Prentice.

Mint tracked down Jenny Prentice, Mick’s wife, who now lived in Newton-le-Wemyss with Tom. Karen and Mint went to interview her, leading to Mint’s best line of the episode: “You don’t need to tell me what the miners’ strike was like – I’ve seen Billy Elliott.”

They learned from Jenny about Mick’s cover story about turning scab and going to Nottingham. Karen asked for the names of the other scab miners who went with him. Tom agreed to supply them but there was an odd look on his face. Tom also emphasises that Mick hated Kevin.

Phil followed up on the other miners who went to Nottingham. Two of them are still alive. They confirmed that Mick planned to go to Nottingham with them, but the night they left he never showed up.

From this information Karen guessed that the Nottingham story was a cover and re-interviewed Tom.

This time he reveals that “a few months after he left he sent Jenny money… Well, he sent it to me, actually. Big envelope, full of cash. And there was a note. He said he knew if he sent it to her, she’d never accept it but that he wanted someone to take care of her. And that he’s sorry.”

The more crucial detail, though, was that the letter was postmarked France.

More revealing info about Kevin’s death

A new forensics report on Kevin’s body was very revealing.

“Various wounds suggest quite a serious altercation,” said River. “A break to the knuckle. A cheek bone fracture. Skin and blood under his fingernails.” There was no DNA match for the blood on the system.

Clay was also found in the tread of his boots that could only have come from very specific beaches on the east coast.

They also found the remains of passport in his pocket, which carried Kevin’s photo but not his name. It was a counterfeit.

Karen speculated that he was planning to start a new life. Were his co-kidnappers planning the same?

“Mick and Andy could be going under new identities now,” she said. “They could be anywhere.”

This coupled with the France postmark meant that Isla and Mint had to spread the net a lot wider when it came to possible sightings back in 1984.

Karen also asked for a forensic artist to whip up some portraits of what Andy and Mick might look like 40 years older, which they could distribute to French police forces.

Where did Mick’s sudden riches come from?

Karen was also pondering where Mick found the money he sent to Jenny if Brodie never paid a ransom.

Isla has trawled Cat’s bank accounts from 1984 and there was no evidence she gave  Mick any large amounts of money, or that she had any money to give – it was rare for her to have over £500 in her accounts. Apparently, she refused to accept money from her father after the Fergus affair.

Phil suggested Mick and co could have been paid to carry out the murder, in which case the man with the motive and money was Fergus Sinclair, the father of Cat’s baby Adam.

Karen interviewed Fergus, but he was not very forthcoming, though perfectly civil and disarmingly blunt in his self-analysis – he knew he’d acted shamefully. He ended the interview when Karen suggested it was convenient for him that Cat vanished. But in the kind of avoid-the-cliché moment this show does so well, Karen exited the interview with her gut suggesting Fergus may be actually be an okay guy (rather than raging about him lying through his teeth).

Who created the fake passports in Karen Pirie episode 2?

Phil thought he’d worked out who made Kevin’s fake passport – “Bridget Early, Craig Lennox’s ex-wife. She was convicted of faking documents in the early 90s.  Moved onto money laundering. She has connections to Ryan Campbell… She’s halfway through a 10-year stint.”

Phil and Karen interviewed Bridget in prison. In return for them arranging a cushier prison for her son, Bridget revealed that she not only forged passports for Kevin, Mick and Andy, but – gasp – for Cat as well.

She said Kevin requested the first three, but Andy asked for Cat’s fake passport to be made without Kevin’s knowledge.

“Did the work. Then her face, a few weeks later, was all over the news,” Bridget said.

Karen Pirie worked out what really happened in the cottage

The CSI team at the cottage discovered a few juicy details. They confirmed Cat was there – there was evidence of her in every room, so it seemed she kidnappers didn’t tie her up and she had free rein. And there was a large area of blood residue with Kevin’s DNA.

Most importantly, they discovered the bullet that killed Kevin in the wall. The bullet was a perfect match for a “Gun 49”, which had links to gangland killings in the ’80s, which was eventually found washed up on a beach.

The trajectory of the bullet suggested that the killer was 5’ 8” – which just happens to be Cat’s height.

In a flash of inspiration, Karen realised Cat was complicit in the kidnapping, Kevin threatened to betray her and she shot him. Is her middle name Sherlock?

History repeated with Sir Broderick

Oddly, when Karen went to tell Brodie that his daughter may have faked the kidnapping as a way of hurting him, his reaction was: shut the case down.

He then doubled down on this in a TV interview with Bel, in which he and Mary jointly announced that Cat collaborated with her own kidnappers. He said they were so ashamed, they would like to make amends by reimbursing the Scottish police service for all the money wasted on the investigation over the past 40 years and wanted them to draw a line under the case. The Grant family would continue the search for Cat independently.

Karen is furious, but for once DC Lees is on her side, raging, “I don’t care how much money he throws at us. He will not tell us how to do our jobs… Go solve the case please.”

Phil to the rescue

When Phil revealed he’d found her burglar, Karen  marched him up to Lees’s office, and admitted everything to her boss – the truth behind the laptop, the leak and her love for Phil.

Lees somehow avoided vomiting, but he was so incensed with Sir Brodie’s recent announcement that he was full-on Team Pirie at the moment. He even regretted trying to turn Isla into a snitch – “I thought I wanted to know what you were up to, Pirie, but it just turns out I was so much better off in the dark.”

He wouldn’t have learned much from Isla anyway – she’d decided she’d rather return to e-crime than be a snitch.

The skeleton in the cave

River took Karen to some caves near where Gun 49 was discovered. The area had the same soil on Kevin’s boots. A nearby cave used to have a back entrance, but that collapsed in – can you guess? – 1984.

Karen authorised River to get a team digging in the cave and pretty soon they’d dug up a skeleton wearing a watch with Cat’s name engraved on it.

So Cat was dead!

What happened to Adam?

Mint and Isla’s search through possible sightings continued. Isla had a brainwave: casinos keep records of big winners and people who cause trouble. Andy Kerr had a serious gambling problem, and had possibly just come into some big money, and the south of France is famous for its casinos. They needed to check casino records.

Using this method, they pinpointed a man named Matthias Johnson, who could be Andy (the photo looked like the aged Andy the forensic artist drew). Following his arrest for fighting, Daniel Porteous, who could be Mick, paid his bail. The address he gave (an old one) was in Italy and he had a son called Gabriel, who was the right age for Adam.

Gabriel was now an activist, with a criminal record for assisting migrants and small boats off the coast of Sicily – and he was currently missing.

Who paid for Cameron to steal Karen’s laptop?

Under interview, Cameron Murdoch said someone contacted him anonymously via his mobile to carry out the burglary.

But when it came to delivering the stolen goods, he overheard the name of the man he handed them over to – “Mr Sinclair”.

Maybe Fergus is the bad guy after all!

Karen Pirie series 2 is currently airing on ITV1 on Sundays at 8pm and all episodes are available in ITVX