We Are the People

We Are the People opens in the cells and gets stranger from there. A man held overnight for being drunk and disorderly walks out with a story: he has seen a young girl chained up. The report is vivid and improbable, and impossible to ignore, and Inspector Kate Longton has to decide how much of it is hangover and how much is horror. The chain is the detail that will not let go, whatever the man's condition when he saw it. It is the sort of opening that earns the show its reputation for strange, small mysteries.

The Field family sits at the centre of the inquiry: John Ronane's Arthur, Mary MacLeod's Ellen and Siobhan O'Carroll's Cissy, with Alex Norton's Ian Doward adding his own account. The Fields present a united front, which in these stories is usually its own kind of clue. The inquiry keeps returning to that one detail, and the episode knows why. Longton works the case with Sergeant Joseph Beck, Sergeant George Parrish, PC Brian Kelleher and PC Danny Sparks, while Detective Chief Inspector Mark Perrin (Edward Peel) keeps the senior eye on it.

Don Webb wrote it, Frank W. Smith directed. Anna Carteret is Kate Longton, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish, C.J. Allen as Kelleher, Mark Botham as Sparks and Edward Peel as Perrin. John Ronane plays Arthur Field, Mary MacLeod is Ellen Field, Siobhan O'Carroll is Cissy Field and Alex Norton is Ian Doward.

The episode's engine is the uncertainty: a witness nobody would trust and a claim nobody can ignore. But the investigation has to treat the story seriously without treating the storyteller as reliable, and that wobble keeps the hour tense. The episode never quite lets you settle on whether the girl is real, and that is the trick of it. By the end, the question of the drunk man's reliability matters less than the question he raised. It is the kind of episode that rewards a second viewing. Strange, careful, and built on a properly creepy image.