Outcast

A murdered prostitute is the kind of case that brings the Serious Crime Group calling, and this time the Vice Squad answers. The two units share the investigation, and the link between them is Kirsty Morgan, sent over as liaison to the senior investigating officer, a detective called Delaney. It sounds like a simple posting. It is not.

Morgan has been on thin ice with Joe Robinson for a while now, and Joe is ready to kick her out of Vice altogether. It is Vickers who talks him into giving her one last chance in the liaison role. The suggestion backfires on him almost immediately: Morgan, desperate to find a new niche for herself, gets up close and personal with Delaney, and the professional arrangement starts taking on a shape nobody ordered. Vickers watches it happen with the expression of a man who just made a bad bet, which is exactly what he did.

The episode is really about belonging. Morgan has spent seasons as the squad's most restless officer, and here she is the outcast of the title, working a corridor away from her own team with everything to prove. Rosie Marcel plays the hunger for approval without making it pathetic, which is a harder trick than it looks, and Lloyd Owen's Delaney gives her something to push against. She wants a seat at the Serious Crime table, and she is willing to pay a heavy price for it.

Around them the familiar unit turns: Hutchins and Parkes on the ground, Johnstone and Cole in the office, while Robinson watches the experiment he never wanted. Eve Bland's Joy and Cathy Murphy's Mrs Holmes fill out the world of the murdered woman, which the case keeps threatening to forget.

Mike Cullen wrote it, Nicholas Laughland directed. But it is a quiet episode about office politics played out over a dead woman, and it works because the show never lets you forget the cost of the seating plan.