Trial & Retribution VII: Suspicion (1)

A woman disappears from her own home. The same night, a severed hand is found floating in the Thames. Trial & Retribution opens its seventh story with that pairing and refuses to make it easy: there is no body to anchor anything, just a missing person, a piece of evidence in the river, and the question of whether the two belong to each other at all.

The hand is what brings DCI Roisin Connor into contact with Mike Walker, who is back in uniform these days after his stint at the top table. From there the case becomes something stranger than a straight police procedural. With no body ever recovered, Connor and her team are working on wits alone — reading suspects, chasing intelligence, trying to stay ahead of a killer who never has to show himself. It's a battle of nerves as much as detection, and the episode keeps both sides of that going without tipping its hand.

Charles Dance turns up as Greg Harwood, and he's a good fit for this sort of thing; a man like Dance can sit in a room saying very little and you still wonder what's under the surface. Neve McIntosh plays Carla Worth, with Gemma Jones as Jean Mullins and Ben Cross as DS Taylor Matthews. Georgia Mackenzie's PC Alison Daniels, Julianne White's Francis Hall, Inday Ba's DC Lisa West and Barbara Thorn fill out the team around Hayman and Smurfit.

Lynda La Plante wrote it, Charles Beeson directed, and the pairing gives the hour a cold, patient feel that suits the material. First nights of a two-parter often have to spend their time laying track, but this one gets proper mileage out of its central absence: a case built around someone who isn't there.

It's an unsettling start to series seven, and deliberately so. Nothing is offered up for comfort, least of all answers. You watch, you wait, and you come back tomorrow.