Grace season 5 ending explained: what happened to Sandy?

*This Grace season 5 ending explained feature contains spoilers*

DS Roy Grace found himself at the centre of a sinister murder investigation and a conspiracy involving a major organised crime group in the final episodes of this year’s fifth series.

The third episode of the ITV drama began with the murder of Hannah Belling, whose body was discovered in her flat with her phone and laptop taken, but her credit cards and valuables were left behind.

This led Grace and his team to wonder if the attack was personal and there were plenty of suspects to consider, including her ex-husband Corin Belling, her missing brother Robbie Taylor, her lover Marcus O’ Sullivan and a former employee who’d become an obsessive stalker, Seymour Darling.

But which of them killed her and what were they looking for in her flat on the night she died?

What was Hannah’s killer looking for?

As Grace digs deeper he discovers that her estranged brother Robbie, had started to work for the infamous Benchdale organised crime group and had been involved in the death of Amelia Pardoe, an innocent girl who was killed when a drive-by shooting went wrong some months back.

Two of the OCG members were identified, but a witness recounts how a third was shot inside the car later on and then staggered away, taking a gun with him. Robbie was that third man and after being shot he fled to his sister’s flat. She called Marcus O’Sullivan, a doctor she’d recently started having an affair with, begging him to save her brother’s life. He did and Hannah promised she would hand the gun in, but it was never received by the police.

Some time later, members of the Benchdale OCG realised the gun Robbie had was also used in other murders they’d committed over the last decade and could therefore be used to bring down the leader of Benchdale and his whole organisation.

They were desperate to get the weapon back and believed Hannah still had it, so got Robbie to search her workplace and then break into her home, torturing and killing him when he couldn’t find it.

Was DS Nick Nicholl corrupt?

When DS Grace and DS Glenn Branson interviewed Robbie’s girlfriend Lauren Packham, she tells them Hannah DID hand the gun in to the police. But there was no record of it happening in the police records.

Grace and Branson were horrified by this revelation because they realise it means someone in East Sussex Police is corrupt - but who?

DI Vee Wilde then told Grace about new dashcam footage of a suspicious male coming in and out of Hannah’s building on the day she died. Grace headed down there to pick it up, but DS Nick Nicholl offered to book the footage in, however a few hours later Grace received a call to say the memory card had been wiped.

DS Nicholl spoke to Grace early in the investigation to explain that his car might have come up on footage close to Hannah’s building as he was staying at a B&B close by. But was he simply covering his involvement in the murder?

He’d also been taking a lot of secretive phone calls, so when the memory card was found wiped, Grace is convinced he’s corrupt and working for Benchdale.

Nick told Grace he couldn’t explain the CCTV and dashcam footage, but the calls were from his wife, who’d kicked him out of their home. Nevertheless, Roy took his badge and suspended him.

But how did Nick first meet Hannah? Branson realises it could have happened at the police commissioner’s dinner a few months back, which Hannah attended. He goes to find photographs of the dinner to confirm this.

Who killed Hannah?

There were several mysterious skin cell DNA profiles taken from Hannah’s flat in the hours after her death and Grace had hoped they would shed more light on who killed her. Unfortunately they came back as ‘Crime Scene Personnel’, which means they belonged to police officers who’d been part of the investigation.

However when Grace hears those samples were logged at 10.43am, he realises they were submitted before the police had started their investigation at the flat.

Later on, Grace tells ACC Cassian Pewe that he’s brought Tim Weatherley - a super recogniser from the Met - to try and confirm it was DS Nicholl on the dashcam footage. Weatherley is unable to make an identification and tells ACC Cassian Pewe as much, but after driving off, his car is rammed off the road.

Meanwhile, DS Branson has found the photographs of the commissioners' dinner, but they show that Hannah met CASSIAN PEWE and NOT Nick. He gives Nick back his warrant card and they head off to find ACC Pewe.

So Pewe killed Hannah and knew his DNA would be left at the crime scene. However, he realised if he attended her flat during the investigation, that would explain why it was there. However the log recorded him arriving at 11.07am and the DNA results were sent at 10.43, meaning his DNA was there before he was!

What’s more, he used Nick’s log-ins to wipe the dashcam footage, implicating his colleague’s guilt.

After finally accessing Hannah’s phone Grace, Branson and Nicholl also discovered a recording of Pewe killing her. It seems she handed in the gun to him, he told her he would process it, but never did. He finally killed her when she threatened to go over his head and find out why the police hadn’t acted on the evidence she had provided.

As such it seems ACC Cassian Pewe was working for Benchdale, but he won’t say what they had on him!

Was Cassian Pewe having an affair with Sandy?

DS Glenn Branson realises Pewe has deleted CCTV footage before and shows Grace images of Sandy’s tense encounter with his boss from a previous series, which he had removed. Pewe knew Sandy was alive all this time and said nothing to Grace, because he was having an affair with her.

He then explains that she had a gambling problem and owed £200,000 to two members of the Benchdale OCG, who had threatened to kill her and her unborn child. Pewe got her a new identity, but never heard from her again after she left the country, yet when she returned and died he was forced to pay that debt off by doing Benchdale a “few favours”.

“Hannah Belling died because I tried to protect Sandy when you couldn’t!” says Pewe, stretching credulity.

Who killed Sandy?

However the final episode of the series, Find Them Dead, came to a close with a shocking coda, in which Roy visited Cassian Pewe in prison and he made another disturbing confession.

The disgraced police boss explained how Benchdale murdered Sandy over her unpaid debt and made her death look like suicide, explaining how the car accident she suffered in Germany was probably an attempt on her life.

"Sandy's debt still isn't paid," said Pewe. "They know she has a son - Bruno. I hear they're out for blood, an eye for an eye!"

So it looks like Det Supt Grace will be going up against some serious players in next year's sixth series!

All episodes of Grace season 5 are available on ITVX now.