Trial & Retribution XI: Closure (1)

Madeline Fuller is raped and murdered, and then nothing happens. Weeks pass, a couple of months in some tellings of it, and Connor still has no leads: no witness, no forensics worth the name, nowhere to go. That failure is the real subject of this first night. Most murder enquiries quietly die exactly like this one is dying, and Closure has the nerve to start there.

Walker's response is to look backwards instead of outwards: he orders a review of unsolved cases. What turns up is the stuff of every cold-case squad's worst afternoon — teenage girls, raped and killed, stretching back ten years, and Madeline's death sits squarely in the same pattern. One tragedy becomes a serial offender who may have been working under the radar for a decade.

To help make sense of the pile, the team brings in Max Stanford, an American criminal profiler played by Michael Brandon with a transatlantic briskness that raises a few local eyebrows. Whether profiling earns its keep or just produces confident-sounding guesswork is left for the viewer to chew on; I'm not entirely convinced Stanford tells them anything good policing wouldn't, but he sharpens the show's focus nicely. Around him, Dorian Lough's DS Satchell and Sarah Ozeke's DS West do the grinding work of matching old cases to new, with Trevor Cooper as DI William Shawl, Kelly Hunter as Mrs Douglas, Crissy Rock as Sylvia Ryan, Claire-Louise Cordwell as Barbara and Tim McMullan as Brooks.

Lynda La Plante wrote it and Edward Hall directs, keeping things dry and procedural where a lesser show would reach for melodrama.

There's something bracing about an episode that admits its heroes got nowhere for a month. Ten years of victims, and nobody had thought to line the cases up until now. The title promises resolution eventually; the hour itself is about everything that stands in its way.