Out of Mind

Series three opens in a Soho brothel, which is a bold place to start a working day. Chappel is there on business when he comes face to face with Frank Vickers, the man who used to be his boss. Vickers is not supposed to be in that part of town, and the meeting drags up old business Chappel would rather leave buried. It threatens the vice squad, and it threatens Jane Farrell, the woman he is with. A procedural opener would have promised safety; this one promises a reckoning, and the series never quite lets the promise go.

The episode works two lines at once. There is the prostitute's death the squad is meant to be investigating, and there is the Vickers problem, which keeps tangling the two together. Chappel tries to bring an ex-girlfriend in to help with the murder, the kind of favour that would have been easy once. She has left that life behind. And it stings more than it should, because the case needs her and he knows it.

Tim Pigott-Smith gives Vickers a smooth, slippery authority, the old handler who still thinks he owns the room. Che Walker drifts around him as the associate, and Peter Marinker's Jimmy Barsi is the sort of name you do not want attached to yours. Rosie Marcel's Kirsty Morgan and Caroline Catz's Hutchins keep the beat going on the ground, while Sarah Parish's Jane gets the scenes that matter most to Chappel.

Rob Pursey and Barry Simner wrote it; Roger Gartland directed. Alongside the names above, Leanne Lakey, Susan Brown, Trevor Cooper and James Chalmers fill out the Soho the show keeps coming back to.

It is a strong, slightly sour opener. The pleasure here is not in the solving but in watching Chappel realise how much of his past is still standing in the room with him. The murder case almost becomes background music to that realisation, which is a brave way to structure a first hour.