No Man's Land

Joe Robinson has earned his promotion to Inspector, and the episode opens with Chappel cashing in the friendship: one last case, as a favour, before the new rank changes everything. It is the kind of ask that sounds easy and is not. The two of them have been through enough together that the debt is never mentioned, only called in.

The target is Keith Beaumont, a former porn baron who never really left the trade, just moved to the parts nobody filmed. It is grubby work in expensive clothes, and the squad has been trying to find the seams in it. Peter Firth plays Beaumont with the settled confidence of a man who has been getting away with things since before anyone on the squad was born. Chappel wants him, and wants him properly.

The riskier story belongs to Kirsty Morgan. She is the newest face on the team, and she goes undercover as a party prostitute with orders to get close and stay professional. And she does get close, in ways the orders never covered. The master description puts it plainly: she takes the role too far. Rosie Marcel plays the slide from work into something personal with real nerve, and the episode does not rescue her from it.

Around the edges, Denise Welch's Clara King and Pauline Black's Helen Armitage give the case its texture, Mark Jax's Gary Robson and William Gaunt's Chivers move through the background, and Superintendent Archer hovers with the quiet menace of a man who knows where the buck stops. Hutchins keeps the station running while everyone else is out in the dirt.

Mike Cullen, Rob Pursey and Barry Simner wrote it, Tim Leandro directed. It is a solid mid-series hour about the cost of getting too close to the work, and it gives Morgan the kind of story the show had been promising her since series one. It is not a happy hour, but then the title is No Man's Land, and nobody promised neutral ground.