Reported Missing

An attractive Russian ballerina from a visiting ballet company goes missing. Jordan reads the report and doubts it. Inman reads it and decides the girl deserves better than a shrug, and he goes out on a limb for her, with rather disastrous results for everyone involved. The report may be genuine or it may be an exercise, and Jordan cannot say which. Either way, the company has its own way of handling things, and the police are on the outside of it.

Louis Marks wrote it and Dennis Vance directed, and the friction between the two men is the real subject. Jordan treats the missing ballerina as a piece of paperwork with a suspicious stamp on it. Inman treats her as a person, and the story punishes him for it. Around them the ballet world closes in: Lydia Tamarova, Ilena Petrova, Alan Pritchard, Leonid Rubin, Galyavitch, Sheila Franklyn, Peter Simmons, every one of them carrying a version of events. The ballet world here is a closed shop of loyalties and evasions, and the two detectives keep knocking on a door that stays shut.

And the episode is honest about the costs of decency. Inman's stubborn kindness is the thing that does the damage, and the plot does not let him off. It is his case in a way Jordan's is not, and the difference costs them both. There is no triumph at the end of it, only a lesson nobody asked to learn.

Derren Nesbitt's Jordan and Fulton Mackay's Inman anchor it, with Morris Perry as Moxon, Nicola Pagett as Lydia Tamarova, Rachel Herbert as Ilena Petrova, Brian Wilde as Alan Pritchard, Brian Haines as Leonid Rubin, Milos Kirek as Galyavitch, Sheila Ruskin as Sheila Franklyn and Roger Kemp as Peter Simmons.

It is a contained story with a wide cast, and the title's dry understatement sets the tone. Reported missing: that is all anyone is willing to say. The show's trick is letting the title do the explaining.