Goodbye Jenny Wren

Maggie Forbes arrives to join the new unit on the day one of its members is already dead. Jenny Kenwright had been looking into a Russian trawler anchored in the estuary, and that investigation got her killed. The Russians on board evidently didn't want anyone asking questions about what they were doing there. So the newcomer's first day is spent between a funeral and the hunt for whoever arranged it, and it is a bruising way to be introduced to the job.

The hunt splits two ways. Fred Smith takes the avenging side, playing cat and mouse with the Russians connected to the trawler, while Maggie is handed something rather less glamorous: her first assignment is a run-of-the-mill adultery case, and she makes a hash of it. The pilot is only half a joke away from admitting that this is how the unit actually works, big international business and small domestic messes sitting side by side. Neither thread gets short-changed, which is rarer than it should be in a pilot.

Terence Feely wrote the pilot and William Brayne directed. Rosalyn Landor's Pru Standfast, Leslie Ash's Fred Smith and Jill Gascoine's Maggie Forbes anchor it, with Michael Petrovitch as Andrei Andreyev, Catherine Rabett as the doomed Jenny Kenwright, Don Warrington as Nigel Beaumont, Richard Beale as Prinley, Christopher Priest as Sutcliffe, Richard Piper as Buck Hodder, John Pennington as Jeffrey Mortimer and Imogen Bickford-Smith as Caroline Cavendish.

It is a lot to fit into one episode, and the ninety-minute running time lets it breathe. The adultery case looks small next to the international stuff, but it is exactly the kind of job the unit will keep being asked to do. But the sharpest decision is the opening one: killing off a member of the team before the new girl has even hung up her coat. After that, the first case always mattered.