The Mad Woman in the Attic (1)

The Mad Woman in the Attic opens with the hero's home falling apart, and a dead woman on a train. Fitz's domestic life has just broken up, and then he learns that a young woman he knew has been murdered, slashed to death with a straight razor on a train. DCI David Billborough brings him in, and the case hands him a suspect who will not behave like one. Thomas Francis Kelly was found covered in blood beside the railway tracks, and he claims to remember none of it.

Fitz does not believe him. That is the job. Kelly sticks to his amnesia through every interview, and the harder Fitz pushes, the firmer the story becomes. Around them the squad works the case: DS Jane Penhaligon, DS Jimmy Beck, D.C. Giggs and Roberts, with Billborough keeping the whole machine pointed in one direction. Rob Palmer's racing commentary runs underneath the opening scenes, a small oddity that tells you the show already knows how strange its world is. The squad's exasperation with Fitz is already there, and so is his indifference to it.

Jimmy McGovern wrote it and Michael Winterbottom directed it, and the episode has the confidence of a series that knows exactly what it is. Christopher Eccleston's Billborough is a fine straight man for Coltrane's Fitz, Lorcan Cranitch's Beck already carries the sourness that will matter later, and Geraldine Somerville's Penhaligon holds her own in every scene she is given. Louise Downie's Jacqui Appleby adds another thread to the tangle. The episode earns its two-part length by refusing to give anything away. The series has never been shy about its debt to the interview room, and this first outing is built on it.

But the pieces do not fit yet, and that is the point of a first chapter. The straight razor is still waiting to be explained, and the amnesia has questions of its own to answer.