Kid

Two domestic scenes open the episode. Dan Boyd is losing sleep over his flowers, because he wants first prize at a show, so he and a friend are taking shifts to guard the garden. It is a small comic strand and it gives the supporting regular something of his own, which the series had rarely bothered with. Then Spender takes Laura and Kate out for the day, and on the hills Kate sees a boy pushed off a clifftop. A witness inside the family rather than a body found by police sets up the case.

The boy is Jason Bamford. Spender sends Stick out to look for whoever did it, and Stick's search takes him into the parts of Tyneside the police would not easily reach. He comes across a doss-house handing out free meals, and the people there will not say anything about Jason. That silence is the episode's central obstacle: the boy ran away from home, and the community around him is closing ranks rather than talking. He is both the victim of an attack and a missing person, and nobody is willing to say what happened to him or who was behind it.

The investigation turns on the family. Jason's father is Staff Sergeant Bob Bamford and his mother is Irene Bamford, and the question the episode asks is why a boy would leave a household headed by a serving soldier. Colin McCormack carries the harder material as the father, and the drama's weight sits in that question rather than in the pursuit. Belinda Chapman's Irene is part of the home he left. Hywel Berry plays Jason himself.

What distinguishes the hour is that the same case is blocked in two different ways at once. The police work the family and get nowhere useful, Stick works the street and reaches a dead end at the doss-house, and the community's protective silence stops both. Kate's witness account is the only route in, which makes the daughters a working part of the investigation rather than bystanders. Against that bleakness Boyd's flower show runs as light relief, in the series' usual paired tone.

The honest limitation is the premise. A runaway pushed from a cliff is a standard missing-child structure, and on the evidence available the episode does not obviously depart from it. The resolution is not recorded anywhere: what happens to whoever pushed Jason is not stated in any source, and the summaries end with the community's refusal to talk. Val McLane's script is the only third-series episode not written by Nail, Stan Hey or Niall Leonard, and it is worth noting that the father's rank is a fact of the story rather than a statement about the army. The hill locations used for the day out are the other thing the episode gets right.