Anywhere In The Wide World

The missing girl is privileged and young, and now gone, and the first read of the case is a dark one: a disappearance with a sexual motive attached. The squad starts where such cases start, checking the obvious ground. But the detail that keeps pulling attention is the parents. James and Joan Fordham (David Bauer and Beth Harris) do not behave the way people expect grieving parents to behave, and the indifference is either a clue or a tragedy wearing a mask.

The episode moves carefully through the case, with the parents' detachment standing in for the evidence they will not supply. Kenneth Cranham's Ken Buckley is among those drawn into the search, and the squad keeps working the ordinary ground: friends and movements, the last people who saw her. The answers, when they come, come slowly and without drama. The parents' stillness is what keeps the case alive in the viewer's head, and the episode uses it sparingly, which is why it works.

Stratford Johns, Frank Windsor and Norman Bowler lead as Barlow, Watt and Hawkins, with Terence Rigby's Snow, Heather Stoney's Det. Sgt. Green, Grahame Mallard's PC Smith and Mike Lewin's PC Hutton working the ground. It is a full board. Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote it, Paul Ciappessoni directed.

The episode's argument is a quiet one: the most telling details are often the ones in plain sight, and a parent's stillness can say more than any confession. It is an unsettling hour, the kind that leaves you watching the parents rather than the case, and the resolution, when it comes, belongs to the family as much as to the police. The title is the ache of it: a girl who could be anywhere in the wide world, and parents who do not seem to mind which anywhere that is.