Family Business

Spender decides to take leave. The job has got on top of him and the plan is to get away from it by visiting an aunt. Aunt Mabel has a problem she needs solved, and the leave does not happen. She asks him to find her son, his cousin Robbie, who has not been seen for eight months and who has spent most of his life in trouble. This is a family with a history of men going wrong, and the missing man is one of them.

The search takes him into a criminal family, one rumoured to have killed someone recently, and he has to work out whether the man they are rumoured to have killed is his cousin. Two questions run at once: where is Robbie, and is Robbie the body this family is suspected of having left? He is not investigating a stranger. He is investigating whether his own relative has been murdered, using the contacts he has precisely because they are contacts rather than police channels.

John Bowler's Vourne heads the criminal family, and the part requires an audience to accept a man whose family has its own rules about loyalty, which is the mirror the episode holds up to Spender's loyalty to Mabel and Robbie. Donald McBride's Robbie is the missing man, present as a credited role even though the search for him is the engine. Lizzie McKenzie's Mabel sets the whole thing in motion.

What the episode does with the series' central subject is make it literal. Spender takes leave to get away from work and is handed a murder inquiry by his own aunt, and the two families, his and Vourne's, are set against each other as the same institution in different registers: both closed, both protective, both settling things internally. There is almost no police procedure anywhere in it. No briefing, no squad, no forensic thread; Boyd is a contact rather than an investigator, and the work is done through family. The domestic strand continues around the case, with Frances, Kate, Laura and Eric all present, so the season's settled private arrangement is at its most visible here.

The honest weakness is that the episode's central question is a strong hook that nothing follows through on. Whether the missing cousin is the man the family is rumoured to have killed is not answered in any source, and neither is the fate of Vourne or his family. One fan account describes Robbie as used or set up by criminals, which is a different claim from the one the summaries make and is not confirmed by either. As a piece of construction the episode is one of the more interesting hours of the season. As a story it stops short of the answer it sold.