The Last Witness (1)

Jane Tennison is fifty-four, carrying twenty-four murder cases at once, and being asked, gently, whether she has thought about retiring. Modern policing runs on forms and targets, and her old style does not fit it; even her current supervisor, DCS Larry Hall, was once junior to her. The question lands the same week a young girl's body is found in a warehouse, tortured and strangled. The girl is a Bosnian Muslim refugee, and her death pulls Jane straight back in.

Two sisters, Samira and Jasmina Blekic, came to England after the war ravaged their homeland, working menial jobs and attracting no notice. Now Samira is dead in an abandoned building. But the coroner's finding is the detail that catches everyone: some of the torture marks were only days old, while many went back more than a decade. The case is not local, not recent, and not going to be solved by form-filling. Jane takes it out of the hands of DCI Simon Finch, the man she put in charge, because she wants this one for herself. Her prime suspect is Duscan Zigic, a man who may have committed atrocities in Bosnia, and she believes finding him is the only way to keep Jasmina safe.

Peter Berry wrote it and Tom Hooper directed. Helen Mirren's Jane is supported by Liam Cunningham as Robert West, Ingeborga Dapkunaite as Jasmina Blekic, Olegar Fedoro as Moslem, Rupert Frazer as George Giblin MP, Stuart Goodwin as Anthony Vane and Steve Gibbs as DC Sean Firth, with Anna Maria Ashe as the newsreader, Leena Dhingra as the pathologist and Kate Lynn Evans as Rosemary Henderson.

Wounds that old do not heal; they just go quiet. Jane understands that better than most, and so does the show. Some cases are personal from the first look at the body, and this is one of them.