Execution

Rachel is carpeted by Gill Murray, who reckons the affair with Nick Savage helped sink the Stelikos case. It is not a happy start to the week, and the week gets worse. Nervous Janice Jadzowski reports her work colleague Gary Birkinshaw missing, convinced he has been killed by his ex-porn-star wife Vicky and her lodger Ashad Sodunke.

Vicky's story is that she never reported him missing because she believed he was in Basingstoke with a mistress. The male officers find her alluring. Gill, Janet and Rachel are not so taken, and her flirtation with the camera and obvious love of jewellery do nothing to convince them. Three weeks after she reported him gone, Vicky is arrested on suspicion of murdering her husband. Rachel has to dig through his home-made pornography collection for clues, a job nobody on the team wants.

Then the case takes its dark twist: Vicky's daughter turns up with an older boyfriend, and the picture shifts again. The daughter's arrival is the kind of detail the show plants early and cashes late. Around it all, Andy Roper, who once had a fling with Janet, tells her he still has feelings for her. As if the squad needed another complication.

Sally Wainwright, Diane Taylor and Suranne Jones wrote it, Syd Macartney directed. Suranne Jones's Rachel and Lesley Sharp's Janet hold the middle, with Adjoa Andoh as Janice Jadzowski, Amelia Bullmore's Gill, Nicholas Gleaves as Andy, Tony Pitts as Adrian Scott, and Ben Batt, David Prosho, Delroy Brown and Tony Mooney in the ranks.

The suspicion runs both ways this week: the team doubt the glamorous widow, and Rachel's own judgement is in doubt at the top of the chain. Watching those two threads tighten is the real entertainment. And the last scene makes you wonder which one will snap first.