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With at least one more series on the horizon, it's perhaps no surprise that Line of Duty's series five finale delivered some, but not all, of the answers we've been waiting for.

To recap: Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) is not 'H', because there is no 'H', with AC-12 having long misunderstood 'Dot' Cottan's dying declaration.

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Through hand signals, Cottan was attempting to communicate four 'dots' – or 'H' in morse code – to imply he was one of four corrupt figures in senior positions within the police service.

Cottan, ACC Hilton and now Gill Biggeloe (Polly Walker) – revealed here as another OCG associate – have been neutralised. But who is number 4? Could it still be Hastings?

Though much of the evidence mounting against AC-12's gaffer was revealed to have been fabricated by Gill, some of his explanations for his recent behaviour – why he met with OCG member Lee Banks and why he disposed of his laptop – didn't entirely add up.

Digital Spy spoke to Line of Duty writer/creator Jed Mercurio to get a full explanation of what exactly Ted may or may not be guilty of, plus insights into the motives of the 'reformed' Lisa McQueen (Rochenda Sandall) and newly-minted police trainee Ryan Pilkington (Gregory Piper).

What does the 'H' reveal mean?

There never was an 'H' – the whole concept boils down to a misunderstanding.

"You have to consider what the origin of that term is, which I think is something that I think has been lost in a lot of the discussion about it," Mercurio says, "It isn't a codename, it's something that comes from Dot.

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Related: When exactly did all the "H" talk start in Line of Duty?



"The police started using this term because they believed that Dot was giving a specific clue that the person's name began with 'H' – so the police used that. And Corbett, because he was aware of that, passed that information on and it became something that was part of the conversation within the OCG.

"But they were all barking up the wrong tree, as is revealed at the end."

Questioning a dying Dot, Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure) simply misunderstood what he was trying to communicate. "He's trying to say something and when she reaches the letter 'H', he blinks. Because he wants the letter 'H' to be in their minds.

"He's not able to verbalize, 'It's not a name, it's a clue!' – if she'd said, 'How many people are we looking for?' and started counting, then we would have got the number. But actually, she was desperate to get the name of one person and that's why Dot was forced to find an elliptical way of saying that it's a multiplicity of people."

Hence the morse code: dot-dot-dot-dot. Four 'Dots'. Four corrupt officers/senior figures within the police.

Is Ted a bent copper?

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Asked directly if Hastings could be the fourth 'dot', Mercurio refused to rule it out. So what about the explanations Ted offered for some of his suspicious behaviour?

Ted's explanation for his misspelling of "definately" – that he'd studied messages exchanged between the OCG and their mysterious employer, and mimicked the incorrect spelling on purpose – is a "plausible" defence, according to the writer.

"Because we haven't witnessed that, it's something where we're relying on the audience to make up their own mind on."

Likewise, Ted's reasoning for disposing of his laptop – that he'd been viewing pornography and wanted to erase the evidence – could also be the truth, though it implies a pretty sketchy understanding on Ted's part of how search histories work.

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"He gave an explanation, again, which is plausible, and that's the important point," Mercurio says, with the chat software we glimpsed on Hastings' laptop potentially being used for illicit, but not criminal, means.

He does add, though, that the possibility that Ted was lying on both points is something that "going forward, we may want to explore".

Gah!



Did Ted give John Corbett up to the OCG?

Shockingly, the answer is yes – he did.

Lisa was able to establish that John (Stephen Graham) was a 'rat' after pretending to set up a meeting with 'H' – only she and Corbett knew about the staged meeting, so when police arrived on the scene, Lisa knew John was informing.

(She can't admit this to the police, because it would mean admitting involvement in John's death and so forfeiting her immunity and witness protection.)

The original tip-off, though, came out of Blackthorn Prison – and Mercurio told us that, despite claims to the contrary, Hastings did inform on Corbett... but not for the reasons you might think.

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"Hastings went to visit Lee Banks, and the fact that he did, circumstantially, does suggest that he revealed something to Lee Banks, which could then have been used to identify Corbett as some kind of informant," he explains.

"I think that was pretty clearly established. Without actually seeing those words come out of his mouth, I think it's pretty clear that that's what he did do."

But while Ted definitely did the wrong thing here, he wasn't looking for revenge over John's attack on his wife, or intentionally serving up Corbett to be killed.

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"I think that what you have to look at is what Hastings said in his interview," Mercurio says.

"When he was asked how he thought Corbett would respond to having his cover blown, Hastings said that he would 'consider his position and take refuge within the nearest police station' – so that suggests that Hastings was following some kind of a plan, which was not to kill Corbett, but to bring him in so he could then assist the police enquiry."

Did Ted plan to pocket £50,000?

The closing scenes of the finale see Ted approach Steph Corbett (Amy De Bhrún) with a package, implied to be the £50k that the police failed to recover – half of the £100k that corrupt Mark Moffatt (Patrick FitzSimmons) had originally given to Ted in an attempt to frame him.

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Mercurio says that Ted "used multiple hiding places" for the cash, which is why the police didn't recover it all. "He realised the money was hot and he was endeavouring to return it, but he was also aware that he was leaving money in a vulnerable position in the hotel room."



"So we didn't see where he put the other £50k, but he must've put it somewhere else – another hiding place – and that money was then something he could use for his personal gain, but he chose to use it as a form of atonement."

Inadvertently responsible for Corbett's death, Ted gives the £50k to Steph out of guilt rather than keep it or return it to the police.

Was Ted actually John Corbett's father?

No, Hastings was not Anne-Marie McGillis's babydaddy.

As Mercurio points out, "if you look at the ages [of the various characters], that's not physically possible, because it would mean that Ted had fathered John before he'd even met [Corbett's mother] Anne-Marie".

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Ted's emotional reaction on learning that John was Anne-Marie's son is down to the fact that "he did have an intimate relationship with Anne-Marie and thought well of this boy, and he's devastated by this tragedy [of John's death] that it's clearly implied he must have had a hand in."

Ted was Anne-Marie's police contact when she became a police informant, following the murder of her husband by paramilitary forces. He apparently was not the one who outed her as a police informant – that was a lie that Gill told Corbett when she recruited him, as part of her efforts to frame Hastings as 'H'.

Did Ted call Lisa McQueen?

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The first episode of the fifth series saw Lisa ignoring a call to her mobile – we then cut to Ted hanging up his own phone, with the implication that he was trying to call her.

This, though, was just "misdirection", Mercurio confirms. "Ted was actually calling his wife – we had the shots of who he was calling on the phone, and then we chose not to use them in the final cut.



"Ted had to surrender his devices and there were no calls from that device to a member of the OCG."

What was Lisa McQueen's deal?

Sorry, fan theorists, Lisa was not an undercover officer within the OCG, just a crook with a conscience.

"She was becoming increasingly distressed by the work of the OCG," Mercurio says. "That's why at the end, we reveal that she's working with young people to keep them out of trouble, because she regrets the life that she had and the crimes she participated in."

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Yes, Lisa turns her life around and is now reformed – she doesn't reveal that Ryan is now a mole within the police force but only out of fear of reprisals from the OCG.

"She still fears the OCG reaching out to her. If she's just visiting schools and youth clubs, saying, 'Don't get involved with crime', then that's no real threat to the OCG.

"But, as per her dialogue to Corbett, she knows that even though Tommy Hunter had witness protection and immunity, the OCG reached out and executed him. So she's well aware that the information that she passes on has to be relatively harmless."



Is Ryan the 'new Caddy'?

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"It's an arc which mirrors Dot Cottan's," Mercurio acknowledged. "And also that of police officers in the real world, who come from certain backgrounds with OCG connections. They are encouraged to become police officers and then serve the needs of organised crime from that position.

"It's something that we know was Dot Cottan's story and we're just presenting it as [also] being Ryan's story. How we go forward with that is something we haven't planned."

Though he had run-ins with the authorities as a young teen, Ryan is still able to become a police officer since he doesn't have any significant criminal convictions. "We were always very careful that he never was connected to any of the crimes by any evidence," Mercurio says.

"Even though he is a sociopathic murderer – he killed Corbett and he killed Maneet – he's not in any way suspected of those offences. And also, he had the mentorship of a police officer, which we saw right at the end of series one."

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Line of Duty fans with long memories – or anyone who's rewatched the series obsessively – will recall that, in the first series, PC Simon Banerjee (Neet Mohan) took a shine to a young Ryan. "So we can understand how he now appears to be someone who had put a criminal childhood behind him and gone straight," Mercurio says.

Who was the man in the cap?

While conducting surveillance on Lisa McQueen, AC-12 captured an image of a man in a cap, leaving the house from which the OCG runs its sex-trafficking ring.



Later, one of the rescued girls, Mariana (Caroline Lumiere Koziol), describes an encounter between Lisa and this man, saying he was "intimidated" by her. The man in the cap is described as "middle-aged, average height or just above, heavy-ish build, [with] light hair” – and with a "strong accent, definitely not local".

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Though we were supposed to suspect Ted, the man in the cap was in fact the late Lester Hargreaves (Tony Pitts), the bent officer and sexual abuser who was later killed by John Corbett.



The image we saw on screen, though, was actually a composite of Pitts and Adrian Dunbar.

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"It's elements of the actor playing Hargreaves and it's elements of Adrian Dunbar, VFX-ed to create a composite," Mercurio explains. "We then tested the composite on each other, to see if people believed it was one or the other or a third person, and people generally believed it was a third person.

"It was important that the image was ambiguous. If it was very clearly Hargreaves, then he would have been identified at that stage. So for the plotline to be possible, it meant that the image had to be doctored in such a way that it wouldn't be identified using recognition software."

Line of Duty Series 5 and Complete 1 – 5 Box Set are out on DVD from May 6.

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