Last Seen Wearing

The disappearance of a child is the one crime Morse can never treat with detachment, and the second film of the series gives him a particularly cruel version of it. Valerie Craven, the teenage daughter of a prosperous local builder, has been missing for several months. The official view is that she ran away and is perhaps better off gone; Morse, played by John Thaw with a stubborn refusal to accept the comfortable explanation, is certain she is dead, and certain too that someone at her school knows why.

The school is a closed, fretful little world, and the script by Thomas Ellice makes the most of its atmospheres of suspicion and denial. A letter postmarked in London arrives, purporting to be from Valerie and assuring her family she is well; Morse reads it as a forgery designed to keep the case cold. The girl's former boyfriend, John Maguire, carries the obvious stain of suspicion, and the discovery that she was expecting a child only deepens the murk. Two men at the school fall under the lens: Donald Phillipson, the headmaster, played by Peter McEnery with a brittle, authoritarian polish, and David Acum, a teacher whose manner is harder to place. The institution, Morse comes to feel, has been protecting its own reputation more vigorously than its pupils.

Edward Bennett, directing, keeps the tone tight and faintly claustrophobic, the corridors and staff rooms closing in as Morse presses. Then the case acquires a second body. Cheryl Baines, the deputy head, is found dead, and Lewis, Kevin Whately's increasingly conscientious sergeant, rounds on his boss for pursuing a murder theory that now seems to have cost a woman her life. The friction between the two men is one of the episode's quiet strengths: Morse's certainty tested by the human cost of being wrong, and Lewis forced to ask whether loyalty has become complicity.

The solution winds through an adulterous affair between Phillipson and Grace Craven, the dead girl's mother, and a sequence of alibis that do not survive scrutiny. A second young woman, Sheila Phillipson, is glimpsed entering Baines's house and claims only to have discovered the body; Acum is seen waiting. Morse, driving Acum toward Reading, realises with a characteristic jolt that Valerie has been hiding in plain sight, assuming the identity of Mrs Acum. Elizabeth Hurley and Julia Sawalha, in early screen roles, lend the schoolgirl world its youth and vulnerability, and James Grout's Chief Superintendent Strange provides his usual gruff counterweight. The writing keeps the audience a step behind Morse, withholding the girl's whereabouts until the very last reel, and the reveal reframes everything the viewer thought they understood about the school's quiet complicity. The episode's final turn, Phillipson cornered and revealed as Baines's killer, confirms that the missing girl's fate was never random, only carefully obscured by people who valued order above truth.