Simisola: Part One

The case begins with a favour asked by a man Wexford trusts: his doctor. Dr Raymond Akande reports his daughter missing. Melanie is twenty-two, a recent college graduate, and she disappeared after going to her local unemployment office to find a job. It reads like a routine missing person case, the kind that resolves itself in a week. Then the woman who handled Melanie's file at the unemployment office, also young and black, is found murdered a few days later.

The coincidence is too heavy to ignore. The Akandes are an immigrant family from Nigeria living in a rural area where only a handful of black people live, and Wexford, following the converging lines of the vanished daughter and the brutal crime, begins to face up to subtly racist attitudes in the community around him and in the police process itself. The episode uses the mechanics of a murder enquiry to examine something deeper: how a family can disappear into a country's assumptions before it disappears into anything else.

George Baker's Wexford is at his most thoughtful, and Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden at his side. George Harris' Dr Akande is dignified and desperate by turns, Ellen Thomas' Laurette Akande is the mother holding the family together, and Jane Lapotaire's Anouk Khoori, Charon Bourke's Sylvia and Fairfax, Louie Ramsay's Dora, Philip Bird's Neil, Adrian Martin's Robin and Tom Donaldson's Ben complete the world. Alan Plater wrote it, and Jim Goddard directed. The trilogy began on 26 January 1996, and from this first hour the series is doing something more uncomfortable than usual, asking Wexford's questions of his own community.

The episode ends with the two threads still separate and the questions stacking up. A graduate who went looking for work, a caseworker who died doing hers, a community that did not see either of them clearly: the strands are waiting to be tied together, and the tying will be uncomfortable for everyone.