The Lost Child

A childminder arrives at the home of fourteen-month-old Vicki Warwick and finds the baby gone and the mother attacked. Susan Covington is alive but barely able to speak, and the search for Vicki starts from almost nothing. Jane Tennison has just left hospital herself, after terminating a pregnancy, and her promotion to Superintendent is only days old. She had expected to return to work with her head down; instead she is running an abduction inquiry with her nerves still raw.

When Susan starts to recover, she remembers a man watching her and Vicki in the park, a stranger with two little girls. The description fits Chris Hughes, a paedophile recently out of prison. Jane knows what Hughes is capable of, which is why she cannot afford to be wrong about him. He is the kind of man the system keeps letting back out, and Jane has the file to prove it. The case keeps circling back to her own raw edges: a missing child, a mother who cannot help, and a suspect she cannot stop thinking about. The first hours of an abduction inquiry are the ones that decide everything, and Jane knows it.

Paul Billing wrote it and John Madden directed. Helen Mirren's Jane is joined by Beatie Edney as Susan Covington, Robert Glenister as Chris Hughes, Lesley Sharp as Anne Sutherland, Tracy Keating as Carolyn Norwood, Richard Hawley as DI Richard Haskons, Jack Ellis as DI Tony Muddyman, David Phelan as DC Pride, Graham Seed as the Doctor and John Benfield as DCS Michael Kernan.

The personal and the professional have never been easy to separate for Jane, and this case does not let her try. Every hour the baby stays missing is an hour she spends imagining the worst. But she keeps looking, because that is the only part of the job that has ever made sense to her.