Dept. Q episode 6 recap: suspicions rise around the Crown Office

Dept. Q is Netflix crime drama following detective Carl Morck (Matthew Goode) as he deals with the guilt of a shooting that left his partner paralysed and a younger officer dead.

As Carl returns to work, he's instructed to launch Department Q, a new arm of the police tasked with reopening cold cases. His first case, a missing prosecutor called Merritt Lingard, which threatens to throw his entire world into turmoil.

Here's a recap of everything that happened in Dept. Q episode 6.

The episode begins on Merritt and Sam sitting on a bench in a cemetery discussing Kirsty. Merritt tells him that Finch’s wife spent time in a women’s refuge. She tells Sam that someone in the Crown Office told Finch about Kirsty and they’ve tried to kill her. Sam says that if Merritt is talking about it, powerful people are probably already watching her. He asks whether she’s been receiving threats. He says if Merritt dies, they’ll blame the nameless, faceless person sending her threats and not someone higher up. Sam throws his rubbish on the floor and tells Merritt to pick it up and look angry at him. As she leaves, he tells her to pick a better meeting spot next time.

Akram and Carl meet at Finch Overseas Shipping. Carl is on the phone leaving Jasper a voicemail asking him to come home and arranging to meet. Akram gets into the car and Carl asks him if he walked down the middle of the car park like he told him to. He says he did. Carl gets a call from Fergus and goes to see him. When he gets there, Fergus is drinking and Carl asks him what’s happened. He turns around and the side of his face is beaten. He says one of the men who beat him said next time Carl comes to see him, to tell him to go. He said there were three of them. Fergus said they left him lying there, so he got up and beat them all up.

Akram comes in and Fergus tells them both that he’s been getting followed since Carl first came to see him. Carl suggests it’s someone on the inside and Fergus says if it is, they also know Fergus worked on the Merritt case for eight months and got nowhere. As Carl leaves, Akram tells Fergus that if Moira hadn’t taken him off the case, he thinks Fergus would’ve solved it.

Carl heads back to the station, but another car is following him. DCI Bruce, Moira and the other two officers on the Leith Park case are waiting for him inside. They’ve arrested someone, but they need Carl to do a line-up. Carl goes to visit the flat at Leith Park. He lays down where he was shot and recalls the masked man’s eyes staring down at him. The officers from the station walk in. They tell Carl that DCI Bruce tasked them with sitting outside and watching who shows up. But, Carl catches them lying. they say they're really there to see if they missed anything.

They say they think Carl is right and that something else was going on. That whoever did it wanted to kill a cop, not just stab the man in the head. Carl recalls how the reporter at the press conference said that Alfie Allen was an informant, so how do they know it wasn’t a hit on Alfie? Carl says that PC Anderson never mentioned the man’s name when they arrived and he wonders if there was an overlap between them both. He says that he looked up Anderson and saw he was top of his class, but he was acting dumb when they met him at Leith Park. Anderson had told them Alfie’s daughter had called him to do a routine wellness check, but Carl wonders if Alfie even had a daughter.

In the chamber, Merritt sits down and plays with her necklace, recalling her meeting with Sam at a hotel room. She wants to know what Sam thinks he knows about her department. She says she knew Sam was at the Finch trial almost every day, sitting right behind Stephen. Merritt tries to determine who Sam has been looking at.

She’s worried they can’t trust each other, so he suggests she pats him down to check he’s not wearing a wire. He says she could be wearing one, too. She stands and tells Sam to make him trust her. To this, he takes off all his clothes. He tells her to do it too, so she does. In the chamber, Merritt tries to pleasure herself and the older woman spots her and disturbs her over the speaker. The man with the hat is watching through the window.

At Dept. Q, Rose is questioning Liam Taylor about his role in choosing witnesses. She asks him who else would know their names before they’re decided? He says only him and Merritt. Rose shows him a photo of Kirsty and he says he’s never heard of her. He says he worked the case for months before Merritt was appointed as lead counsel over him. Rose asks if he was okay with that and he said a woman’s voice worked better in this case.

She then asks how well Liam knew Finch’s advocate, Robert McDonald. She suggests Liam shared information with him, to which he is offended. Carl says they’re having a problem believing Liam didn’t know about Kirsty. Carl suggests that maybe Liam sabotaged his own case as revenge for Merritt stopping their relationship. He says he was angry, but he didn’t do that.

Carl says Kirsty is out in a month and he thinks she’ll be dead within days. Carl asks Liam hypothetically, if Merritt had told him about Kirsty, would he have thought she wasn’t credible? And he says that he would’ve visited her himself before making that judgment. He says that if he’d said no, Merritt could’ve gone above him. He realises they’re suggesting she went to Stephen. He says angrily that Stephen brought Merritt into the department and would only help her.

Jasper is waiting to meet Carl and another man walks in and asks him if he’s Carl’s kid. When Jasper tries to get up from the table, the man grabs his leg to hold him down. He tells Jasper if he makes a noise, he’ll ruin him. He says he knows people who would pay good money to look at Jasper, all of him, or do things to him. He says they’d film it, too. He tells Jasper to pass the message on to Carl.

At this moment, Carl walks in and clocks the man. He follows him outside and beats him up. He mentions Finch to the man, but the man says he doesn't know who that is. He spits in Carl's face. By now, people are filming Carl on their phones so he leaves.

Rose goes to see Hardy in the hospital. He’s having another rehab session and makes a slight movement in his leg. Hardy says he’s been reading old news from around the time Merritt went missing. He found nothing interesting until he read a story about a man called Ned Finkle. He said he was released from the hospital after being run over by a young lawyer called Julia Montgomery. He was jogging at the time when Julia ran him over and he lost both his legs. Julia claimed she was forced off the road by another vehicle.

He then reveals that Julia Montgomery was born Julia Burns. She’s Stephen Burns’s daughter. Rose realises that it seems like a message was being sent to Stephen and that Merritt probably knew about it. Back at home, Martin plays Carl a video online he's found of Carl beating the man up in the street.

At the police station, the officer working on the Leith Park case and Rose are watching the CCTV footage of Carl’s fight. The officer notes that the man parked there on purpose so it would all be caught on camera. Then, another man drives up to take him away. The car he stood by wasn’t even his. They clock it’s a BMW 7 Series and they get a license plate from another CCTV camera.

Meanwhile, Carl goes to visit Rachel, but Dr. Sonnenberg has returned. He asks where Rachel is and says that nobody told him Rachel would be gone. He storms out. Elsewhere, Rose is driving Akram and he asks about her incident, specifically how she felt after. She tries to brush it off, but then tells him she tried to kill herself. Hardy found her and helped.

They arrive at some flats looking for Edmund Solomon, the owner of the BMW. As they get closer to the flat, Akram hands Rose his pass and tells her to wait there. Akram knocks on Edmund's door and tells him his car is on fire. When he comes out and barges past, Rose holds up the police pass. To this, Edmund tries to grab Akram, but Akram pushes him down the stairs, breaking his leg.

Akram then stands on the wound while questioning Edmund about who hired him to harass Carl. He stops and holds out his notebook to show Edmund he’s listening. Back at the station, Moira is angry at Carl for the fight. She notes that it was clearly a set up, but she's furious that setting him up was even possible. She says she won’t fire him, though, because that’s clearly what they want.

Rose and Akram come into Moira’s office. Rose reveals that Edmund is employed as a chauffeur by Ballantyne Transfer & Security, owned by Finch Overseas Shipping. Carl tells them they’re also investigating the Crown Office, specifically Stephen Burns. They tell Moira about one of Finch’s people driving Stephen’s daughter off the road during the trial. DCI Bruce interrupts and says it’s time for the line-up.

Carl looks over the line-up and although he asks for one man to remove his mask, he tells Moira that the shooter isn’t there. Meanwhile, in the chamber, Merritt opens the door to the hatch and the can of drink inside implodes from pressure. She can hear the man and woman arguing about the airlock being broken again. Merritt takes the crushed can and stares at it.

All episodes of Dept. Q are available to stream on Netflix.