Harm Done

Wexford's week starts badly and gets worse. Two teenage girls are abducted. A three-year-old vanishes from her own bedroom. And a man paroled after a conviction for offences against children comes back to the town. Any one of those would be enough to fill an episode; Harm Done gives the old D.C.I. all three at once, and the small-town calm he usually polices starts to crack. Three cases at once, none of them small, and Wexford has to hold the line while the town looks to him for answers.

The return of the paroled man matters most, because it forces the community to face something it would rather forget. Wexford is left juggling the practical work of the abductions with the longer, uglier questions the man's presence brings back to the surface. D.I. Burden works the cases alongside him, and the familiar rhythm of the pair of them keeps the story grounded while the town gets jumpier around them. The two abductions keep everyone looking over their shoulders, and the missing toddler puts a fear in parents that no case file can contain.

Ruth Rendell and Christopher Russell wrote the script, and Bruce MacDonald directed. George Baker is in fine form as Wexford, with Christopher Ravenscroft as Burden, Louie Ramsay as Dora Wexford and Diane Keen as Jenny Burden. The community is filled out by Simon Shepherd and Clare Holman as Stephen and Fay Devenish, Bryan Pringle as Tommy Smith, Sian Webber as Jane Andrews, and Russell Mabey and Annette Bentley as Colin and Debbie Crowne.

It is a story about how a town behaves when it is frightened, and Rendell never lets the police procedural smooth the edges off that. Children go missing, old accusations resurface, and no one gets an easy answer. The show is content to leave the town shaken and the viewer unsettled. Harm Done is a strong season opener, and it earns its unease.