No Crying He Makes

A woman's baby is taken from the High Street and another child left in its place. The substitution is the detail that makes the crime hard to look at: this is not a snatch-and-run by a stranger, it is someone who planned to swap one infant for another and then walk away as if nothing had happened. Wexford is called in, and the investigation immediately stops being routine police work and becomes something personal, the sort of case every parent on the street is suddenly an expert on.

The episode follows the enquiry as it pulls the surrounding families into view. Pippa Bond, played by Jane Horrocks, and her relation Tony Jasper, played by Clive Wood, are tangled in the circumstances around the missing child, and the domestic world of the town closes in around them. The regulars orbit the case as ever: Louie Ramsay's Dora, Charon Bourke's Sylvia Wexford and Ann Penfold's Jean Burden keep the home front present, while Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden works the case beside George Baker's Wexford. Jonathan Lacey's Trevor Bond, Alison Rose's Susan Raines and Christine Kavanagh's Leila Jasper fill out the families at the centre of the storm.

Paula Milne wrote the script, which is worth noting because the episode has a writer's eye for the ordinary detail that makes a horror feel real, and Mary McMurray directed. It went out on the 23rd of December 1988, a scheduling choice that gives the whole thing an extra layer of chill: a Christmas story about a stolen baby.

The hour works because the crime is so bare. No money, no politics, no elaborate scheme, just a mother's child taken on a shopping street and replaced with somebody else's. The mystery is in the why, and the episode is patient enough to let that question sit where it belongs, in the middle of a community that suddenly cannot trust the pram next to its own.