Inner Circles

The manager of an exclusive club called The Huntington is murdered, and the local force already has its answer: a gang of youths from the council estate did it. The official theory is neat, and neatness has never impressed Jane Tennison. She believes the killer is a club member, a woman named Maria Henry. But the closer she gets to that theory, the more the community closes around her.

Nobody in the area wants to help her discover the truth. Witnesses dry up, doors close, and the silence is polite in a way that says everything. The local police, DCI Raymond among them, have settled on the gang, and the club's members are no keener than the estate to see the theory tested. Jane has spent her career fighting to get inside rooms where the truth is kept; The Huntington is one such room, and this time nobody wants to let her in.

Paul Billing wrote it and John Madden directed, and it went out on 7 May 1995. Helen Mirren's Jane is supported 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.

A murder in a members-only club becomes a test of who gets to decide what happened. Jane's answer, as ever, is that the evidence decides. The neighbourhood disagrees, and the stand-off is the episode. It is not the first time Jane has been the only person in the room asking the obvious question, and it will not be the last. She has always worked better against hostility than against silence, and here she gets both at once.