Trial & Retribution V (1)

Series five starts in the ground. Demolition workers clearing a yard where a boarding house once stood turn up the skeleton of a young woman, and Walker is handed the case with the expression of a man who has just been given someone else's washing up. The victim is seventeen, and the bones have been there long enough to have their own history. Worse, he is working with Pat North's ex-boyfriend, DI Jeff Batchley, which cannot be helping the atmosphere in the squad car. And then the dig goes deeper. More skeletons come up, one after another, and the single case becomes a mass grave with a boarding house at its centre.

Lynda La Plante wrote it, Aisling Walsh directed. It first aired in June 2001, and it sets its clock differently from what came before, all its horror in the past tense. The team around Walker is a good one: Dorian Lough's Satchell, Paul Kynman's Batchley, James Simmons' Collins, Inday Ba's West, with Tony Bell as the SOCO and Richard Durden's Dr John Foster on the forensic side. The demolition men, Stewart Howson's Dennis and Nick Bartlett's Harry, get to be the first to see what their diggers have found, and the look on their faces sets the tone for the whole episode.

There is something properly unsettling about buried history, and the show leans into it. A house that respectable people lived in, with what was underneath it all along. Walker's discomfort is understandable; even by his standards this is a grim one. But the series is at its best in this mood, forensic muck up to the elbows and no easy answers in sight.

The mystery of who the girl was, and who put her there, is going to take a while. The episode knows it, and it settles in for the long, dirty work. Nothing about this one will be quick, and nothing about it will be clean.