Thin Ice

Eighteen-year-old Danny Gallagher is the one who finds his father's body. Ed Gallagher has been murdered and the house robbed, and Danny's own mother treats him like a suspect before the police do. Sarah Gallagher plainly regards her son as a disappointment, and the feeling is mutual enough that Janet and Rachel notice the heat between them right away.

A neighbour puts Danny outside the house on the night of the murder, which would be tidy. Then Sarah lets slip that Ed was gay and used to pick up young men for sex, and the tidy version falls apart. One of those young men is soon found with Ed's car, and the list of suspects grows longer than the family ever wanted it to be.

The Gallagher household is one of those places where everyone is keeping a different version of the same story, and the episode has a quiet feel for that. Meanwhile the Scott household is rearranging itself: Adrian has been pushed into moving in with his girlfriend for good, and Janet responds by asking her own mother to move in, which says plenty about how she expects that to go. Elsewhere, Sean answers the phone to a stranger asking for a woman called Susie. That is the name Rachel gave her one-night stand, and Sean is not so slow that he cannot count the days.

Sally Wainwright, Diane Taylor and Suranne Jones wrote it, Morag Fullarton directed. Lesley Sharp and Suranne Jones lead, with Josh Bolt as Danny, Clare Holman as Sarah, Tony Pitts as Adrian, Sean Maguire as Sean, Amelia Bullmore as Gill and Judy Holt's Scary Mary in support alongside David Prosho and Delroy Brown.

A wealthy man's double life leaves his family to pick through the wreckage, and neither of our detectives is much safer at home. The title earns its keep: everyone here is walking on thin ice, and the cracks show before the credits do.