Trial & Retribution XII: Paradise Lost (1)

It starts badly for Milton Jones and gets worse from there. He's found blood-stained after his girlfriend is murdered, and when the police reach him he can't tell them what happened. Amnesiac shock, he says. All he can offer is a half-memory of another man in her flat before she died. That's thin stuff to build an arrest on, but arrest him they do — and then the evidence starts pointing the other way.

So far, so familiar. What lifts this first half out of the ordinary is everything that gathers around the case. Jones is Black and the dead woman was white, and his family waste no time accusing DCI Roisin Connor of racist conduct. It's an ugly charge and it sticks to the investigation like grime, because she has enough on her plate already. Then two more women are killed and the shape of the thing changes entirely. This looks like a serial offender, and he seems to be choosing white women who have boyfriends from the black community.

Walker's answer is an unusual one: he brings Jones himself onto the inquiry, a cleared suspect working alongside the officers who very nearly charged him. And just when nobody needs another complication, there's Connor's relationship with a barrister connected to the case, which threatens both the investigation and whatever trial might follow it. She's a good officer having a bad year, and Victoria Smurfit makes you feel every bit of the squeeze.

Julie Dixon and Lynda La Plante wrote it, Alex Pillai directed, and the supporting cast is nicely stocked: Clint Dyer as the bewildered Jones, Adrian Lukis as Neil Dench, Gemma Jones as Dr Jean Mullins, plus Sarah Ozeke as DS Lisa West, Marsha Miller as Mavis Jones and Joseph Mydell as Matt Turner. Dorian Lough's Satchell is on hand as ever, doing the unglamorous legwork.

The episode doesn't resolve much, being only half a story, and it knows better than to try. What it does is set its pieces up carefully and let the racial politics of the case breathe. The second night has some answering to do.