Doors

A young woman with children placed in her care is accused of shoplifting, and Inspector Kate Longton gets drawn into a case far more delicate than the charge sheet suggests. Doors is about the rooms behind the accusation: the woman's life, her circumstances, and the system that placed the children with her in the first place.

The theft, if it happened, is the smallest part of it. Longton digs into the details of the accusation and finds the usual tangle of half-truths and hard luck, and the inquiry spreads outward through the people who orbit the young woman's life. Sergeant Joseph Beck and Sergeant George Parrish support the work, PC Danny Sparks and PC Brian Kelleher keep the beat, and the case draws in Janet Philips, Maggie Norman, a boy called Ollie and Mr. Thomas, each holding a piece of the picture. The episode handles the young woman and her situation with care, refusing to reduce her to a headline about shoplifting.

Tony Parker wrote it, Leonard Lewis directed, and the pairing was one of the fourth series' most dependable, turning out several of its strongest hours. Their working relationship gave Hartley a steady hand in these middle years of the Longton era. Anna Carteret is Kate Longton, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish, Mark Botham as Sparks and C.J. Allen as Kelleher. Tom Georgeson plays John Holden, Lizzie Mickery is Janet Philips, Amanda Bairstow is Maggie Norman, Oliver Smith is Ollie and David Ross is Mr. Thomas.

The episode's strength is the balance it strikes between the procedural necessities of an arrest investigation and the emotional territory around young people and their carers. Nobody here is purely guilty or purely innocent, and the show is comfortable with that muddle.

It is a solid, careful hour. The doors of the title are the ones that open onto other people's lives, and Longton, as ever, is willing to walk through them.