Iced

A young student is killed in a motorbike accident, and the connection to the police is personal rather than professional: Spender is godfather to the dead man's girlfriend. He keeps hold of the case for that reason and no other, which is the honest starting position. Separately, a known drug courier is arrested coming back into the country, and the arrest gives the force a route into supply in the North East. Spender takes the courier's route rather than the accident.

The cover is built out of another man's life. He poses as an old friend from the courier's army days, since turned informer, which is a riskier impersonation than the show had attempted before. The cover has to survive the courier's own memory of the man Spender is pretending to be, and every conversation carries the possibility of the wrong detail. He is not working alone: Booney, a female detective, works the operation with him, and the two of them set about establishing where the drugs are shifted and how they move around the region.

The strands join when the student's death is identified as a drugs death rather than a road death. The substance is ice, crystal methamphetamine, presented here as new to the region and new to the force dealing with it. The episode's posture is unusual: the police learn about the drug alongside the audience rather than arriving as experts, and the interest is in a regional force catching up with something it has not seen. The death that mattered to Spender personally and the supply operation he has been chasing turn out to be the same case, and he does not get the result he set out for.

Julie Peasgood's Booney is worth noting for how little the episode makes of her. She is simply the officer working the case, given an equal share of an operation, and nobody comments on it. In a run where women are mostly relatives or victims, a professional woman with parity and no explanation is a small departure that matters. The distribution target at the top of the regional operation is what the whole impersonation is aimed at, though no source names him or describes how the operation is closed.

The episode is one of the run's more consistently serious hours. The drug material is treated soberly, the users are not moralised at, and the student's death is framed as a consequence of supply rather than a personal failing. The writer credit rests on the Wikipedia table alone and cannot be asserted as verified. What holds it together is the structure: a private motive and a public case that resolve into one another instead of running side by side.