Crack Up

An armed response team is called to a robbery at an off-licence, and by the time it's over a black youth lies dead, shot by police bullets. The community around the shop doesn't need much convincing that something stank, and the investigation Clark's team walks into is as much about trust as about ballistics.

But then a cassette tape starts circulating. It suggests two officers sold the dead robber the gun in exchange for drugs, and the version Clark is handed is incomplete. His team has to chase the original recording, and the truth they find there isn't the comfortable one. Ray Brennan wrote it, Robert Bierman directed, and the episode maps the collision between police authority and a local community whose faith in the force has already been spent.

The guest cast is sharp. Steven Waddington, fresh from The Last of the Mohicans, is D.S. Slater, Neil Stuke is D.C. Green, and Charlie Creed-Miles and Danny Sapani, the latter years from Penny Dreadful, both turn up in the crowded world around the case. Neil Stuke's D.C. Green was a few years from Game On, and Hugh Ross's Commander Sullivan is among the regulars now, a senior pair of eyes on the force's handling of itself. Around them the regulars do their usual dependable work, Siobhan Redmond's Connell caught between community outrage and departmental procedure.

It's a tense watch in the way the show is always tense: nobody innocent, nobody clean, and the crack trade giving everyone a reason to lie. The tape is the MacGuffin, but the real subject is the distance between the police and the people they're supposed to serve, and whether an investigation can ever close it. The off-licence scene that opens the episode is deliberately ordinary, which is what makes the shooting land. And the tape is handled well, an object passed hand to hand that everyone wants to control, even the people who want it to be true.