Viewers knew that podcaster Riz (Weruche Opia) was investigating the unsolved disappearance of Amy Knightley from 17 years ago, but not that the character we’d been watching throughout the episode was Amy herself. We’d been shown rebellious Amy befriending quiet Caitlin (Laura Marcus), and both of them wearing the same school uniforms as Ember’s daughter and her friends, so it was easy to believe that all the girls existed in the same timeframe.
The present-day storyline, in which Ember suspects that 16-year-old local girl Miranda’s pregnancy was due to statutory rape by a sexual predator targeting young girls, also led viewers to believe that the girl’s secret older ‘boyfriend’ Malachy (Tom Glynn-Carney) was Miranda’s abuser.
The photograph, however, reveals that Malachy is in fact a younger version of Mack, Ember’s dead husband. In 2007, Mack committed statutory rape by having sex with underage schoolgirl Amy before her disappearance, and as a result, Ember is shocked to realise, must now be considered as a chief suspect in her disappearance.
It’s a revelation that prompts Ember to re-evaluate her whole relationship with Mack, who was illegally having sex with Amy while also sleeping with 16-year-old Ember. Was her schoolgirl love story and pregnancy at age 17 by an older man as romantic as she’d always believed, or had she, like Amy, been targeted and groomed by someone with a perverse interest in young girls, and perhaps even, a killer?