Care and Protection

A nine-year-old girl, Tracy Uphill, is reported missing on the streets of Denton just before Christmas, and the investigation falls to DI Jack Frost by default: nobody else at the station is free to take it, and Frost himself should be at the hospital, where his wife is dying. Superintendent Mullett knows it, everyone knows it, and that is precisely why no one objects when the case is pressed onto him. Assigned alongside him is DC Clive Barnard, who happens to be the Chief Constable's nephew — a keen, inexperienced officer who has yet to learn how his new guv'nor works.

The search takes a dark turn when the teams uncover a skeleton, its wrist fixed to a locked strongbox, which proves to be empty. A caller begins demanding £2,000 for Tracy's safe return, raising and then deflating the family's hopes. She is eventually abandoned, unconscious, outside a hospital — alive, though plainly traumatised — and the detail that breaks the case is almost embarrassingly homely: cat fur found on the girl's clothes guides Frost to a solitary local woman who keeps dozens of cats and had taken the child in.

The skeleton belongs to Felton, the vanished bank clerk with £40,000 three decades earlier. When a shabby parish regular named Ronald Garwood is shot with the very weapon that killed Felton, suspicion settles on Gerald Powell, a retired bank manager. Powell had conspired with Felton to fake a robbery decades before and murdered his accomplice to bury the secret; cornered, he takes his wife's life and then his own rather than be arrested. A thirty-year-old case finally closes.

None of that, though, is what the episode is really about. Frost is away when his wife dies, learning of it only when he reaches the hospital at last, and he sits with her nurse, Shirley Fisher, telling her the story of the George Cross he won for disarming a violent criminal — an act he insists was born of despair, not courage. It is the first honest glimpse of the grief that will shape the whole series, and David Jason plays the scene with a restraint the busy plot rarely matches.

Care and Protection, scripted by Richard Harris from R. D. Wingfield's Frost at Christmas and directed by Don Leaver, opened a franchise that would run for eighteen years. As a pilot it is crowded — a missing child, a cold robbery, a widow's grief all fighting for space — but it announces a hero, and a mood, worth coming back for: a shabby, grieving detective whose best work happens in the gaps left by the official version.

It is easy to see, watching Care and Protection now, why the series endured: the town, the rain, the stubborn hero who would rather be right than popular. For newcomers it is the natural starting point; for old hands it is the episode that set the tone for everything that followed.