Trial & Retribution XIII: Curriculum Vitae (1)

Suzy McDonald comes home from work and walks into the worst thing a parent can walk into. Her baby daughter Poppy is dead in her cot, and the nanny, Leanne, has gone. No note, no explanation. Connor and the team take one look at that arrangement and draw the obvious conclusion: the girl on the run is the girl who did it.

To be fair to them, so would you. A missing nanny from a dead baby's room is about as damning as circumstantial pictures get. The police track Leanne down and arrest her, and then the tidy version starts coming apart at the seams. Her real name turns out to be Rachel Burns, and she has form — not for harming children, but for names. She's worked as a nanny for several families over the years, and every time she used a false identity. Why does someone do that if she has nothing to hide?

That question is the engine of this first night, and it's a good one. The title tells you where the writers' interest lies: this is an episode about a curriculum vitae, a life assembled out of omissions. Philip Gladwin's script keeps pulling another layer off. The more the team learns about Rachel, the less certain anyone is about who the victim here actually is, and the obvious suspect becomes a good deal less obvious.

The regulars carry it well. Victoria Smurfit gets some of her best material as Connor, David Hayman's Walker growls around the edges of the case, and Dorian Lough's Satchell does the grafting. Vince Leigh and Ryan Kiggell fill out the squad as DS Sam Palmer and DC Jeffrey Dobbs. In front of the camera as suspects and sufferers: Victoria Hamilton, quietly devastating as Suzy MacDonald, Sinead Matthews as Rachel, Paul Hilton and Gillian Kearney as Lee and Gina Casper, Dominic Rowan as Matthew Ryan.

Tristram Powell directs with a light hand, letting the domestic scenes do the damage. Nothing here is resolved, and nothing should be yet. But half a story this unsettling earns its cliffhanger.