Dabbling (1)

The Vice Squad gets pulled sideways in this one. The Drug Squad needs a hand, and Chappel's team is seconded to crack an escort agency that looks respectable on the front desk and hides rather more behind it. The suspicion is straightforward enough: the place is a cover for drug trafficking and prostitution, and the job is to prove it.

And the proof has to come from inside. Rookie P.C. Dougie Raymond and his colleague Cheryl Hutchins are the ones sent in, which tells you something about how the squad values its new blood. They take their places among the agency's daily trade and start collecting the sort of evidence a major bust needs. The work is slow and unglamorous, the kind that turns on who you can trust and what you can quietly record. Beneath the polite surface the thing runs deeper than a simple vice charge, into organized crime that somebody has taken trouble to conceal.

J.C. Wilsher wrote the episode and David Thacker directed. Ken Stott leads as Chappel, with Caroline Catz's Hutchins and Marc Warren's Raymond doing the undercover legwork. Anna Chancellor's Dr. Christina Weir is around the edges, and Garry Cooper plays Supt. Jeff Callard. David Harewood is Sgt. Joe Robinson, Corin Redgrave is Lord Buller, Philip Jackson is Nigel Wingrove, and Sonya Walger and Siobhan Burke play Emma and Amy.

As the first of two parts, the episode is more interested in the approach than the capture. It is a solid procedural hour, and the pleasure is in the mechanics. The show trusts the audience to sit with the grind of an infiltration rather than rush to the raid, and that restraint suits The Vice. I would call this a steady, workmanlike entry rather than a standout, but it does its job without fuss.