Clever Boy

A teenage boy walks out of school moments before his O-Level examinations and does not come back. Clever Boy takes the most ordinary setting imaginable, a school hall on exam morning, and turns it into the scene of a disappearance.

The investigation is built on a narrow window of time: between the students filing into the hall and the moment the papers went down, somebody slipped away. Inspector Jean Darblay and her officers have to work out why a boy would walk away from the most important morning of his school career, and the question drives them through the Patterson family and the school's own ranks. Mary, Harold, Andrew and Alison Patterson each have their version of what happened, Mr. Beaseley speaks for the school, and Mrs. Heatherington watches from the edges. Sergeant Joseph Beck and Sergeant George Parrish do the rounds while PC David Gallagher runs the errands, and the pressure of O-Levels hangs over the whole inquiry like weather.

William Humble wrote it, Leonard Lewis directed. Stephanie Turner is Jean Darblay, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish and Gerard Kelly as Gallagher. Frances White plays Mary Patterson, Malcolm Terris is Harold Patterson, Anthony Preston is Andrew Patterson, Jayne Linton is Alison Patterson, Peter Schofield is Mr. Beaseley and Connie Merigold is Mrs. Heatherington.

The episode's trick is making the institutional pressure part of the mystery. An exam is a deadline with consequences, and for a certain kind of boy the fear of it can outweigh everything else in the world. The show understands that, and it treats the missing pupil as a boy in trouble rather than a problem to be cleared from the books.

It is a contained, focused hour, the kind built on routine and the single deviation from it. Sometimes that is all a case needs to start unspooling.