Deadly Intent: Part 1

A man goes under the knife in a Mexican clinic to have his face remade, and the audience is handed a fact the police will not have for weeks. That cold open, staged before a single British location appears, is the clearest instance in Above Suspicion of the method its creator describes as giving viewers more evidence than she gives her detectives. The third series then drops into North London, where a disgraced former officer, Frank Brandon, has been found shot dead in a crack den on a squalid estate.

Anna Travis, newly promoted to inspector, joins the murder team run by DCS James Langton, for whom the dead man was an old friend from the drug squad, and that personal stake pulls the killing into the command politics that run through the whole programme. Brandon had lately married Julia Larson, a wealthy Danish woman who had briefly employed him as a chauffeur; questioned, she is evasive and appears frightened, and the money behind her small, respectable life becomes one of the questions the squad cannot yet answer. The forensics complicate the story. Only two bullets entered the body, yet residents heard three shots, so someone else was there when Brandon died.

The break comes from an unlikely witness. Jeremy, an autistic youth, had noted the registrations of the cars parked outside that night, and their owners prove to be Silas Roache, a big-time pusher importing a lethal American drug called Drop Dead; Eddie Court, a small-time crook and customer; and Danny Petrozzo. Roache is arrested, to the fury of the drugs squad officer DCI Sam Power, whose surveillance of the man has just been wrecked. Court says he left Brandon alive with Danny, and Danny is then found dead in his own vehicle. Two cases, a shooting and a drug operation, are now running in parallel, and the part ends on the second body with no culprit named.

The strength of the opener is its willingness to leave the serial-killer template behind. The first two series dealt in a single pattern and a single kind of victim; this one forces the squad through a network of buyers, pushers and watching officers, and the friction with Power's drugs squad gives the institutional theme its first real teeth. The series moves its leads into the drug trade after two serial-murder stories, and the production stressed the change: Kelly Reilly described the world of hard drugs and money as not where you would imagine seeing a young woman getting her hands dirty. The weakness is structural. This is preparation throughout, a death, a widow, three registrations and a second corpse, closing nothing, and its pay-off belongs entirely to the two nights that follow.

It opens the series the contemporary press judged the best of the four, with The Guardian calling Deadly Intent "the third, and the best so far". The Times, which had damned the show as garbage in 2009 and the work of a hack a year later, decided it had grown into something worth watching. The overnight audience was ordinary for a stripped ITV procedural, 5.495 million on ITV1 and narrowly behind BBC One's Silent Witness. It also gives Kelly Reilly's Travis the rank that lets her drive an inquiry rather than assist one, and it plants the case whose aftermath, the promotion fight and the drug dealer Fitzpatrick, reaches into the next series.