Keeper of Souls (1)

The episode opens in a bar, where transsexual Vera Reynolds is doing cabaret, all sequins and defiance. Jane Tennison is now working Vice. The case that lands on her desk is a rent boy found dead in a burnt-out flat. The body is Colin Jenkins, known as Connie, and Jane's prime suspect is Jimmy Jackson, who grooms underage rent boys for prostitution.

It is not a clean case. Jane has been passed over for Detective Superintendent and handed in her notice, and the department is in a strange mood. She briefly reunites with an old flame, now a married crime writer on a book tour with four children, and breaks it off before it can go anywhere. Her new posting is Metro Vice, where she rejoins the difficult DS Otley, scapegoated after a botched operation, and finds an Incident Room full of humour that feels like a polite fiction. Operation Contract, meant to clear the streets of rent boys, has produced no arrests to speak of, and Jane starts to smell a mole inside the police.

The feeling hardens when journalist Smithy says Connie promised her a story implicating a high-ranking police officer and an MP in criminal activity. Jane circles the wagons and starts limiting what information leaves the room. She has given up smoking and chews gum with a feverish intensity; even simple maths will not sit still in her head. The trail leads to a centre for homeless boys run by Edward Parker-Jones, and the focus stays on Jackson, violent and ruthless in his procurement of children.

Lynda La Plante wrote it, David Drury directed. Peter Capaldi plays Vera Reynolds, with Michael Shannon as Jake Hunter, Greg Saunders as Connie, David Thewlis as James Jackson, Danny Dyer as Martin Fletcher, Tom Bell as DS Bill Otley, Richard Rees as Mike Chow, Terrence Hardiman as Commander Chiswick and Mark Strong as DI Larry Hall, Helen Mirren's Jane at the centre of it all.

Underneath the departmental mess is a dead boy called Connie, and Jane is one of the few people still looking at him.