At Risk

Grant is not sent to a crime scene this week. He is sent to a committee room, to a Thames County Council Social Services case review, and it is the hardest kind of work the squad does. The question on the table is whether a baby has been harmed by the people who should be caring for it. It is a question with no good answer in it. Joan Fisher took her child to hospital, and the medical staff found injuries that should not be there, injuries that look as though they happened before. But the word everyone is careful with is proof. Suspicion is not enough, and everyone in the room knows it.

Elwyn Jones and Alan Plater wrote this, Frank Cox directed, and it is a quiet, weighted episode that leans on dialogue and procedure. There are no chases here, no clever traps. Grant has to sit in rooms and listen, ask the questions nobody wants to ask, and decide what he actually believes. Evin Crowley plays Joan Fisher with a guardedness that makes the whole thing harder to read. Peter Wyatt's Dr Nicholson speaks for the hospital; Derek Thompson's Dave Marshall, Janie Booth's Ann Buckley and Yvonne Bonnamy's Helen Richardson fill out the case file. Watt appears in the background, letting his sergeant carry the weight. WPC Arthur, played by Philippa Howell, is there for the parts that need a woman's voice in the room.

This is the show at its most uncomfortable, and that is not a criticism. Some weeks the drama is a gun at an airport; some weeks it is a case review with a baby's name on the file. The second kind needs a steady hand, and the episode gives it one. The proof, whatever it turns out to be, will not come easily. It never does in these rooms.