As Good Cooks Go...

George Barton does not report his wife missing so much as he sits across from Grant and lets the silence do the talking. She has vanished without a trace, car and all. When the car turns up, the trace is no longer missing: blood stains on the seats, a single shoe left behind. The kind of detail that reads one way to a civilian and another way entirely to a detective. And then, because the episode is not finished with him, Barton takes a telephone call he cannot quite account for.

Elwyn Jones wrote this one, Alan Dossor directed, and together they keep the mood close and uncomfortable. It is domestic police work, which means the horror is the ordinary kind. Grant carries the case, with David Lloyd Meredith's Det. Insp. Evans in support and Watt and Hawkins keeping the squad turning above them. Ray Mort plays Barton with the right helplessness, a man asking questions he is afraid to hear answered. David Schofield hovers at the edge of the story, never quite explained, never quite gone.

There is a particular dread in a missing-person case that starts with a car found half empty. The episode leans into it without overplaying it. Terence Rigby's Snow, Peter Clough's Lincoln, John Flanagan's Pearson and Christopher Scoular's Collins do the running around that keeps the world of the show honest, and the uniformed detail matters more than usual here. It is a story about absence, and absence is harder to photograph than a body ever is.

The title sounds like the start of a backhanded compliment, and the story underneath it is not much kinder. A woman, a car, a shoe, a phone call. The episode is less interested in neat endings than in what a bloodstained car seat does to a man's hope.