Nightsleeper Ending Explained: Who Was the Driver?

Warning: contains major finale spoilers for Nightsleeper.

Did Abby (Alexandra Roach) make it to Marrakesh? Let’s hope so. If anybody’s earned a bit of R&R, it’s the (no longer Acting) Technical Director of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre. In the final episode of daft, bingeable thriller Nightsleeper, Abby stopped The Heart of Britain from ramming at top speed into the NCSC HQ at the very last minute, saving not only the lives of those on board but also several branches of Pret and Costa Coffee.

Having finally halted the runaway train, Abby met her double-act partner Joe (Joe Cole) in the flesh, and gave him the chance to slip away before the police arrived to arrest him. Joe chose to stop running and face the music, ostensibly as character development but more realistically because after the six hours he’s just had, the man is exhausted. The police had somebody else to arrest though, in the form of “The Driver”. For the whos, hows and whys of it all, read on.

Who Was “The Driver”?

Abby’s mentor Paul “Pev” Peveril (David Threlfall) orchestrated the whole operation. The ex-NCSC employee was the Heart of Britain’s hackjacker. He’d anonymously recruited the Glasgow team and used Abby’s Project Mashhad code to stage an object lesson about national security.

During Pev’s time at the National Cyber Security Centre, he’d compiled a report into how vulnerable the UK rail network was to hostile cyber-attack, but nobody heeded his warnings. Pev lost his job, leaked the report, and was frustrated that his research was being ignored. Six years later, when he learned that the UK government planned to sell off the rail network to a foreign power, he carried out his own ‘hackjacking’ to prove what a serious threat it was and to attempt to, ahem, derail it.

In Pev’s plan, Abby was supposed to be on holiday in Morocco and out of danger, and the train was supposed to have been emptied at its first stop and so would be free of passengers. He programmed The Heart of Britain to crash into Victoria Station in London – home to the National Cyber Security Centre HQ – to send a message there. Instead, Abby’s flight was delayed and so she came in, and Yaz failed to get all the passengers off the train at Motherwell.

An expert in – as Abby says – exploiting vulnerabilities, Pev anonymously recruited his plan’s various operatives (Yaz, the journalist, the people who staged the disruption at Glasgow station…) and promised them payment for discrete tasks. “I would only ever cause an accident if I knew that it would prevent a much bigger one,” he told Abby.

So Iran and South Africa Weren’t Involved?

Nope, it was all Pev, using international proxies to cover his tracks and to lay the blame at the feet of terrorist groups. He’d created the Tehran group terrorist confession found on the USB stick given to  journalist Rachel Zhu, and laid a false electronic trail using mercenaries in Johannesburg.

How Did Pev Get Abby’s Project Mashhad Code?

Presumably, because Abby’s flatmate and colleague Tobi (Gabriel Howell) had illegally smuggled sensitive code out of HQ and taken it home just so that he could “see how it works”. That must have made it accessible to Pev, who, like the rest of them, is a master hacker. In Project Mashhad, Abby had written the code to hack a vulnerability in an Iranian train carrying nuclear weaponry, which Pev used to hack The Heart of Britain.

What was the Transport Secretary’s Plan?

Liz Draycott MP (Sharon Small) was in the late stages of a deal that would sell the UK rail network to a French company, whose operational code contained vulnerabilities like the one Pev exploited to hack The Heart of Britain. NCSC boss Nicola Miller (Pamela Nomvete) was against the sale, and used Pev’s original report into the security threat it would represent to try to make her case, but was ignored.

The deal’s over now anyway. Pev’s plan to expose the vulnerabilities of such a deal worked and there’s no way it’ll go ahead after the hackjacking became public knowledge.  Draycott tried to cover up the planned deal by flushing the paperwork down the train toilet , but having given an interview about it to journo Rachel Zhu, it’s about to become headline news.

Why Was Joe Wanted by Interpol?

Because he was on the run after trousering £200k from a drug dealer’s house during a police raid. A former officer in the Met, Joe initially claimed to have been framed for the theft by the dealer, but later confessed to having taken the money and stashed it at his home, where it was discovered. He’d been on the run ever since, and was only returning to London to see his young son, who’d threatened to reveal his location after finding out about the stolen money. On the train, Joe had confessed his crime to his son, and told him not to run away from his mistakes like he had. As soon as Joe got off the train, he’d have been straight into police custody.

Who Installed the Phone Blockers and Single Board Computer?

That was Yaz (Sharon Rooney), a disgruntled employee facing unemployment without a redundancy package because she was just shy of the two-years’ service period. She’d been recruited by Pev online and paid to install the equipment while the others created a distraction on the train with the staged theft from the fake mother and baby. Yaz was also supposed to get everyone off the train at Motherwell so that it would leave the station empty, but failed to do so, partly because UK trains are often scandalously inaccessible to passengers using wheelchairs.

How Did Abby Stop the Train?

First, she forced the train system to restart and used the intervening time to patch the vulnerability and lock out the single board computer that Pev was using to control the train. In a terrible bit of timing (and plotting?), Fraser (James Cosmo) had a heart attack and fell down dead on the laptop they would have used to drive the train at that exact moment, breaking it irreparably. That meant Abby had succeeded in locking Pev out but now nobody was in control of the train.

She realised that the train’s automatic safety response would activate if it approached a red light, bringing it to a stop, but, unable to reach the signalling centre on the phone, had to physically hack into a set of lights at Victoria Station. Abby turned the lights red, which triggered the train’s braking system and it screeched to a halt just before slamming into the station. Crisis averted!

Nightsleeper is available to stream now on BBC iPlayer.

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