The First Killings

The first body is a chef called Philip Blake, found hanged with his tongue cut out and a silver spoon sitting where it should be. It is not an accident, and it is not a robbery. Bishop James Perch goes next, clubbed to death with an apostle spoon in his mouth for the same missing part. The pattern settles in fast. Victims are stripped but not robbed, every one of them carrying a disciple's name and killed in the manner of that disciple's death. The calling card is deliberate, and the message behind it is biblical.

Red works the case with Duncan Warren, a former colleague, and the script keeps the Bible close without ever letting it do the explaining. But the case has a second layer, and it is more personal. Years earlier Red turned in his younger brother, Eric, for murder. Eric is out now, living in a hostel and reluctant even to see his brother. The hostel warden, a vicar called Stephen Hedges, offers Red the key to the killings. It turns a lock on something nobody in the Met wants to look at, and Red has spent years living with what he did to Eric.

What stays with you is how plain the horror is. Nobody explains it to you. There is only a dead man and the spoon where his tongue used to be, and the knowledge that the same thing will happen again before the story is done. The show doesn't decorate any of it, which is exactly why it works.

Lizzie Mickery and Boris Starling wrote it, Diarmuid Lawrence directed. Ken Stott is Red, with Kieran O'Brien as Eric, Frances Grey as Kate Beauchamp, Tony Lucken as Philip Blake, Ernie Cooke as Bishop Perch, and support from Juliet Diamond, Serena Gordon, Jamie Draven, Howard Crossley and Ray Trickitt.

It's a grim opener and an assured one. The show is telling you straight off that faith can curdle into something that kills, and that nobody involved is going to be comforted about it.