Trial & Retribution XXI: Ghost Train (1)

A young girl falls out of the Big Wheel at a funfair and dies, and everyone does the decent British thing: they call it an accident and start planning the inquiry. It takes Tess, the fair's fortune teller, to spoil the consensus. She has suspicions, and she takes them to DS Satchell, who it turns out is a relative of hers. The research calls her his aunt; the show gives Jane Lapotaire the job of being right about something nobody wants to hear.

Her theory has an ugly sort of logic to it. A development company wants the land the fair sits on, and land like that doesn't come free while a funfair occupies it. Whether the fall was arranged or merely convenient, the fair people have their own ideas about who benefits.

Tommy Gilbert, the owner of the fair, gets to Tess and pressures her into backtracking on her statement. You can see why he'd do it; a fair that makes headlines about a dead girl is a fair with a countdown clock on it. But then Tommy himself is murdered, which rather settles the question of whether there was anything to hide. Whoever killed him was willing to go further than intimidation, and now Walker and Connor have two deaths where last week they had one tidy accident.

Jane Prowse wrote it and Stefan Schwartz directs. Hayman and Smurfit lead, with Vince Leigh as DS Sam Palmer, Martin Brodie as Tommy Gilbert, Bernard Lloyd as Pops Gilbert, Alexandra Gilbreath as Alex Phelps, Amelia Donkor as Lisa Gale, Jack James as Mickey Olsen and Franc Ashman rounding out the roster.

The setting does half the work. A fairground after dark, all generators and empty rides, is naturally sinister in a way no set-dressing could fake. And Satchell getting family involved in a case is always worth watching; he wears worry badly.