In Showtrial, the viewer is the jury, and the flashbacks are part of our evidence. In those flashbacks, we repeatedly see Talitha and Dhillon’s walk home from the ball, both from their memories and in CCTV footage. In all of the walking home scenes, Talitha is wearing Dhillon’s velvet jacket over her dress, and no visible scarf around her neck. However, when Dhillon gives his second police interview, in which he spins the story of the boatyard drinking, the “peace mission” to Hannah’s, and the subsequent deadly threesome, Talitha is shown wearing the scarf tightly knotted around her neck.
Why is Talitha only seen wearing the scarf (which would have been seen even under the jacket) post-ball in this one version of events? Because those scenes – the boatyard, Hannah ruefully forgiving the pair and inviting them inside – are pure inventions by Dhillon. They’re the story he spins to the police, not real memories. We can say this because at the start of episode two, we see a sequence in which Talitha (no scarf) and Dhillon walk across the bridge, spliced with Cassidy and Thornley following the same route in daylight. That sequence isn’t framed as either Talitha or Dhillon’s memory, it’s presented as an objective event. And in the objective not-filtered-through-anybody’s-drug-and-drink-fuelled-memory version, the scarf isn’t around Talitha’s neck.
Dhillon Harwood: Guilty
If you’re thinking that Talitha – who says she must have lost the scarf at the ball – could easily have put it back on, so need more to convince you that Dhillon was the sole killer, there’s plenty. Unlike Talitha, he’s proven to lie repeatedly and acts suspiciously after Hannah is reported missing. He lies about knowing Hannah to his mother, and then watches videos he covertly took of her on his phone. He takes his clothing from the ball and the murder weapon scarf to the New Forest to burn. And unlike Talitha, he appears nervous in his police interviews, in the first of which he tells a pack of lies to the police about having had sex with Hannah prior to her leaving for work that night, before changing his story.
Then there’s Dhillon’s history of stalking and sexually harassing women. Even Talitha said that he was relentless and obsessive if she didn’t message him back immediately. He twice sexually assaulted previous partner Lucinda Bright by initiating sex when she was unconscious, and by lying about wearing a condom during sex. He repeatedly filmed Hannah without her knowledge, and was scared that her complaint would see him kicked out of university – no small deal for the son of a shadow cabinet minister. Dhillon’s predatory behaviour was covered up by his well-connected middle class parents, and so went unpunished until this violent escalation.
The real evidence though, is that fantasy ‘flashback’ sequence of Dhillon’s. Having witnessed the fight between Hannah and Talitha at the ball, knowing about the threatening texts and Hannah’s complaint about Dhillon to Dr Vendler, how likely is it that Hannah simply forgave all and invited those two in for a chummy drink? That never happened, because Talitha was the one telling the truth. The real story is that Dhillon left her house after she fell asleep, went to Hannah’s, where be possibly drugged her (Hannah had GHB in her system, though could have taken that recreationally) raped and strangled her before dumping her body in the water. And when he was caught, he tried to shift the blame onto his oldest friend, whose brash and personality he knew would do her no favours in court.
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