Trial & Retribution IX: The Lovers (1)

A newly-wed couple, and then only one of them. The Lovers opens series nine with Tom Franke gone, vanished from the life he'd so recently set up, leaving a new wife and an empty house behind him. The question that drives the first night is deceptively simple: has he done a runner, or is there something much worse underneath? Either answer is possible for a long while, and the episode milks that uncertainty properly. A man who disappears by choice and a man who disappears because someone made him look identical from the outside, and the difference between them is everything.

So the early going is all timeline-building and door-knocking: who saw him last, what kind of marriage this actually was, whether Tom Franke was the sort of man who walks away. Walker oversees, Connor pushes the enquiry forward, and DS Satchell and DC Lisa West do the unglamorous legwork that these stories always treat with respect. Gemma Jones is back as Dr Jean Mullins, and Marcia Warren plays Enid Franke; David Calder and Penny Downie appear as William and Mrs Thorpe, with Miriam Heard as Susan Harrington.

Michael Feast's Tom Franke is barely present and entirely central, which is a nice bit of casting economy — a whole case hanging on an absence. Lynda La Plante wrote it and Tristram Powell directs, giving the hour a quieter register than Blue Eiderdown's clubland sleaze. This one is domestic scale, and all the better for the change of gear after last year's establishment rot.

There's no grand conspiracy here, just the small failures of connection that La Plante has always been interested in. First nights live or die on whether they make you care about finding out, and by the hour's end I very much wanted to know which kind of husband Tom Franke had been.