Nothing Personal

Joey Pearce is found hanging in his cell at St. Helen's station, a young man with a university place already secured and no obvious reason to end things. But the custody sergeant's report says suicide, and Clark, sent in to look at the death, does what the CIB exists to do: he starts pulling on the thread anyway.

Rob Heyland wrote it, Jenny Killick directed, and the episode's method is one of its quiet strengths. Clark interviews everyone who was in the custody suite that night, one by one, and the routine of it builds pressure slowly. Pearce had been picked up with a known dealer called Dilly, who was carrying dealer quantities of crack, and the further Clark digs, the less tidy the story gets.

The answers he finds aren't just about Joey. The case keeps curving back toward Jenny Dean, and the episode darkens as Clark learns uncomfortable truths about the woman he's involved with. It's a test of the whole CIB project, really: what do you do when the investigation starts eating your own people.

The cast is another glimpse of the future. John Hannah, years from Four Weddings and a Funeral, is D.C. Mellis. Steven Mackintosh, who'd turn up in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and a thousand telly dramas since, plays P.C. Fulford. Rudolph Walker and Doña Croll bring real weight as Joey's parents, and their grief is the thing the episode refuses to rush past.

It's grim, and it should be. A death in custody is never just a procedure, and this one leaves a mark that carries into the episodes after it. The custody suite interviews are the show at its most procedural, and that's a compliment. The patience of it, the repetition, the way a small detail finally slips, that's how real enquiries work, and the episode trusts you to notice.