The Day That the Circus Left Town

A fourteen-year-old girl is missing, and two hundred pounds has vanished from her mother's desk. The Day That the Circus Left Town starts with the two losses and dares the viewer to decide whether they are the same story. The title suggests the answer before the episode earns it.

The investigation has to establish the connection between the missing girl and the missing cash, and Inspector Kate Longton works the case with Sergeant Joseph Beck, Sergeant George Parrish, PC Brian Kelleher and PC Danny Sparks. The family at the centre, Audrey Mason and her daughter Miranda, supply the emotion, and the surrounding cast, Ernie, Pansy and a man called Pepe, give the town its usual texture. The circus of the title, with its promise of colour and escape, hangs over the whole inquiry, and the episode uses the image without overplaying it.

Tony Parker wrote it, Michael Custance directed. Parker had been writing for the show since the third series, and his feel for family stories shows in the way Audrey Mason is drawn. Anna Carteret is Kate Longton, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish, C.J. Allen as Kelleher and Mark Botham as Sparks. Rita May plays Audrey Mason, Marcia Healey is Miranda Mason, Derek Royle is Ernie, Fanny Carby is Pansy and Julian Littman is Pepe.

The episode is at its best when it holds the two questions together: where is the girl, and what does the money have to do with it. The answer, when it comes, is the sort that makes the grown-ups in the room feel the weight of their own assumptions.

It is a serviceable, solid hour that weaves domestic concern through traditional police work. Two hundred pounds is not a fortune, and a teenager is not a child anymore, which makes the worry worse, not better.