'D.I. Ray' Recap: Episode 3

D.I. Ray airs Sundays at 9:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Only one of the sixteen people found inside the shipping container linked to Imran Aziz’s company is alive. The young boy is sent to the hospital, where he’s put into a medically induced coma. Everyone else seems to have died of suffocation. None of them have identification or phones, although Vietnamese money and family photos are found on them.

D.I. Ray brings in a Vietnamese translator named Min to pose as a Vietnamese national looking for transportation to the United Kingdom in social media groups believed to have a connection to human trafficking. Someone offers a quick trip as well as a job as a delivery driver once she arrives in the UK. They offer the name of a fast food takeout service called Dish2U as the legitimate company that will employ her.

Ray goes with Min and a colleague to speak to workers at a Dish2U hub. The delivery workers are too scared to talk to the police, one cook explains. They are brought over by an agency that takes their documents and houses them in cramped quarters, and probably makes lots of money off them.

Throughout the investigation, Ray has conveniently ignored or missed her boss’s suggestions or orders, and now her leadership is imperiled. The desk clerk at police headquarters has put in a formal complaint of bullying against Ray, disliking Ray’s tone when she responded to the clerk’s mistakes: giving Ray the ID of another South Asian officer, and addressing her with a lower rank than she actually holds. Ray’s boss is also worried that Ray has been traumatized by this case: there is no sign of forced entry on her apartment, despite the attack in the tub that she reported. Ray’s police officer fiancé Martyn offers to put in a word for her with higher-ups, but she wants to keep work out of their relationship.

Despite the doubts, Ray continues her investigation. She and Khatri interview Imran Aziz’s mother and sister, who refuses to believe that Aziz was involved in anything unsavory until her mother admits that her late husband left the family business in debt. Aziz’s mother recalls a fight Aziz had with a man outside their house recently, and identifies him as possibly the same man seen in surveillance footage outside Anjuli’s car around the time Anjuli was killed.

Another recognition of the man has turned up: a police officer has recognized him from an arrest in a domestic violence case several months ago. But any police records are sealed, unusually. However, the officer still has the address of the call.

Ray orders a raid on the house, but the suspect is not there, just a mom and her two children. The woman knew the suspect as Marco, although that is not his real name, and dated him for a bit in a purely physical relationship. She’s reluctant to talk about the incident involving police—she and Marco had been drinking, and her nosy neighbor called the police. She hasn’t seen Marco again since then.

Ray gets a mysterious call to a meeting at police headquarters and is forced to surrender her phone before going in. Maureen Groves introduces herself and explains that Aziz was an informant in an ongoing drug investigation. Marco—real name Magnus Tranter—is a suspect. Ray can continue her investigation, but she must inform Groves before making any moves to arrest Tranter.

Luckily, another avenue of inquiry has opened up. The driver of the truck that dropped off the container full of migrants has been identified from his crossing of the border: Karl Shaw. After speaking to his mother, who tries not to reveal anything, the police eventually track him to an ultrasound appointment with his girlfriend. They approach him as he’s going into the hospital. He tries to run, but is convinced to stop and talk in the parking lot. On orders, he turned off the air circulation for the container while going through the border so that customs couldn’t detect that there were people inside. He then didn’t have an opportunity to turn it back on, sealing the fate of his hidden passengers. Before he can reveal whose orders he was following, he is plowed over by a car and killed by a driver who looks like Tranter but escapes.

At the end of this rough day, Ray asks Khatri to get a drink with her. They go to his regular pub. He talks about his son, with whom he shares custody with his ex-wife. The night turns rowdy and he and Ray end up dancing to a Bollywood song. When they leave, she kisses him—and he reciprocates. They spend the night together at her place.

She wakes up to numerous missed calls from Martyn, who’s worried about the safety of her flat after the attack in the tub—she should be staying with him. She sends Khatri away instead of letting him make her coffee in her woefully deficient kitchen. She then heads to a lunch with Martyn and her parents, where they announce their engagement. Martyn also mentions that he has inquired about a house that’s for sale.

He's once again disappointed when Ray abandons him in the middle of a conversation about their future to go talk to the Vietnamese boy from the container, who has woken up. Min joins Ray at the hospital to translate, but the boy speaks English—that’s why he came to the UK with his father, who doesn’t. His mother is sick and they needed money for her treatment, so his father found short-term work for them in the UK.

The people who transported them lied, telling them they wouldn’t have to ride in a truck. The passengers ran out of water and air in the container, but his father found a small hole and told the boy, whose name is Thao, to stay by it. At one point, someone other than the driver opened the container and was so angry that Thao played dead out of fear. He says the man might have been Tranter. And then he asks again about his father, not realizing he is dead.

Khatri stops by Ray’s flat that evening to drop off food and check on her. She hugs him and holds him for a long while before giving him a small kiss. I’m engaged, she tells him, and I’m your boss. Their relationship shouldn’t continue. He tells her to get some rest and starts to leave.

Martyn calls just then, and Ray tells him she’s going to stay at her own place again that evening. Martyn is standing in the shadows outside Ray’s flat, and watches Khatri leaving. He ends his call with Ray and looks at a picture of her kissing Khatri outside the pub, then calls Tranter and tells him he was right. Do it, he tells Tranter.

Khatri turns back toward Ray while she stands in her doorway and walks to embrace her. Tranter speeds past and fires a round of bullets. The window shatters, and Khatri collapses onto Ray.