A horrific car accident has seen Zack Hudson (James Farrar) and Teddy Mitchell (Roland Manookian) swerve into a freezing cold body of water.

As viewers of the soap know, this is a direct result of Zack trying to flee the area with Teddy’s son Barney (Lewis Bridgeman) – the catch being that Zack was the one who had actually fathered him sixteen years ago.

Desperate to form a bond with his estranged ward, and convinced that he was unsafe in the warring Mitchell household, Zack devised a plan for them both to move to Inverness.

He’d hoped that elder Mitchell brother Harry (Elijah Holloway) would help him out, and divulged every last detail.

Mortified that his younger sibling had a different dad, he rushed home to confront his parents. Harry not only spilled about Barney’s parentage, but also wanted to know whether mum Nicola (Laura Doddington) had killed his ex-girlfriend Shireen.

Nicola denied all involvement, and despite just finding out that he had been living with a huge lie over him for best part of two decades, Teddy went along with it.

It soon transpired that he wanted her to leave Walford in the wake of the revelation – Barney wasn’t to find out, and he would have his two boys by his side without any further animosity.

Before either of them could coax Harry home, he wanted to teach Zack a lesson. One moment he was brandishing a wrench at the PT in the garage, and the next minute poor Zack was unconscious in the boot of a car.

Teddy noticed that his son had gone missing and decided to use the tracker on his phone to follow. An unwilling Billy and Honey Mitchell (Perry Fenwick and Emma Barton), who were taking Nigel Bates (Paul Bradley) to the cinema, were roped in as transportation.

Their vehicle charged in Harry’s direction, and they found him pulled over in some dense woodland.

Honey wanted to call the police, but Billy asserted that it wasn’t the Mitchell way of doing things. Instead, they convinced Harry to get into their car and return home, while Teddy wanted some time to talk to Zack.

They dragged his lifeless body into the passenger seat of the car, and Teddy charged off.

As Zack began to wake, his demeanour became more and more frantic. He had no way of knowing where he was or what was happening, and tried to get Teddy to stop.

Suddenly, Teddy lost control of the car, sending them flying over the side of the embankment and plunging into the water.