Trial & Retribution VI (1)

A woman out walking her dog in the woods with her two daughters is grabbed by a long-haired man while the children watch. She tells them to run, and they do. That opening is handled without fuss and all the worse for it: no music telling you how to feel, just a struggle in the trees and two girls legging it for their lives. From there the case lands with D.I. Pat North when a local girl has been snatched.

The inquiry does not run clean. A local sex offender confesses, which should simplify things and instead muddies them, because a confession this convenient raises its own questions about what actually happened in that wood. North has to work out whether she is holding the right man while the clock runs against her.

Walker, meanwhile, is close to useless, and deliberately so. His ex-wife Lynn has a new boyfriend, and the programme lets his private misery bleed into the case until his team are effectively working around him. It is a shrewd bit of writing from Lynda La Plante: the senior officer being the least reliable person in the room is exactly the sort of institutional mess this show does well.

Ferdinand Fairfax directs. Kate Buffery leads as Pat North, with Dorian Lough as D.S. Dave Satchell and James Simmons as D.C. Doug Collins doing the legwork, David Hayman brooding as Walker alongside Jacqueline Tong as Lynn. The Mellor family give the story its human stakes: Juliette Cheveley as Jane and Gemma Bourne as Tara, the two girls who saw everything, Martin Wenner as James Mellor, and Katie Angelou as Diana Leach. Tim McInnerny plays Eric Fowler.

As first halves go, this one sets its table carefully rather than dramatically. The abduction is frightening enough on its own terms, but the real hook is the confession that fits too neatly, plus a detective superintendent whose head is somewhere else entirely. Both threads promise trouble for night two.