Silent Scream: Part 1

A young woman in Victorian dress is stalked through a period scene, the pursuit tightening shot by shot, until the sequence reveals itself as a film within the film. The woman is Amanda Delany, a 24-year-old British star whose life off camera runs on hard drugs, starvation diets and a great deal of sex. She is found dead at her London mews house, stabbed many times and left with only her face unharmed, discovered by her driver, Harry James. There is no forced entry. The house keys, a soft toy rabbit she kept on her pillow and the murder weapon are all missing, and a crucifix prop from one of her films lies on the floor.

DCS James Langton takes the case in a fury. He has just been passed over for promotion to commander in favour of Sam Power, a younger and less experienced officer, and he is convinced the decision followed his failure to capture the drug dealer Fitzpatrick and that someone on his own team informed on him. Ciarán Hinds, who plays him, described a man coming to the end of his working life, tired and wanting the last secure job, and carrying chips on his shoulder. Langton works the murder partly to find out which colleague cost him the job, and the inquiry into a dead actress is tangled from the start with an inquiry into his own command.

Amanda was estranged from her parents, mistrusted her agent Andrea Lesser as greedy, and was said to be about to write tell-tale memoirs. The day before she died she told her stand-in that a woman's scream had woken her in the night; her former drama-school flatmates, from the squat they once shared, tell the police that she would silently scream in her sleep. By the end of the part there are several possible suspects and one of those flatmates has been found dead, apparently of a drug overdose. No culprit is established.

The strength is the command plot. Making Langton's demotion and his suspicion of betrayal the frame for a murder inquiry gives the episode an interior pressure the case alone would not supply, and it fixes the promotion wound that runs to the end of the show. The weakness is that the part is a list of suspects built around a victim seen almost entirely in flashback and hearsay, which keeps it slow to cohere; The Guardian's reviewer found the script dud while crediting the uneasy mix of police and showbiz, and the appeal of the leads, for carrying it.

It is also the first Above Suspicion made for a weekly slot rather than consecutive nights, and the last the programme made at all, since ITV cancelled it after this run. The opener drew 6.95 million. Part of the run was filmed in Lexham Mews, a Belgravia address well suited to a murder in a mews house. The showbiz setting gives La Plante's own film-industry knowledge somewhere to work, and the murdered star, played by the newcomer Joanna Vanderham, is assembled almost entirely from what other people say about her.