Trial & Retribution XXII: Shooter (1)

It starts with a robbery. The Bilkin family hit a local jeweller's, the manager is killed, and from there the first half of Shooter spreads outwards into trouble that never stays contained to the original crime.

Miller is a rival of the Bilkins, and after the raid he gives the police information on them. They walk free anyway. Then Miller is murdered, and DS Satchell witnesses the killing. That is the moment the story stops being about a robbery and becomes something far more frightening. Satchell knows who did it, and they know he knows. He has a pregnant wife, Kay, and a daughter, Abigail, and once he takes stock of what he saw, home stops being somewhere safe. When the family go missing, the dread that has been quietly building finally lands.

Tony McHale wrote it and Benjamin Ross directed. David Hayman and Victoria Smurfit are in place as DCS Mike Walker and DCI Roisin Connor, though this instalment belongs mostly to Satchell's side of the desk. Ruth Gemmell plays Kay and Aiofe Doherty-Ayres is Abigail, with Celia Henebury as DC Carol Short. As for the Bilkins themselves, Sally Dexter plays Donna, Beth Cordingly is Wendy and Jaimi Barbakoff is Zoe, while Darrell D'Silva turns up as Johnny Howells and Simon Kunz as Felix Levington.

The Bilkins make proper villains because the programme treats them seriously rather than as pantomime. A family that shoots a shop manager, absorbs an informer's betrayal without blinking, then goes after a copper's household is a shape of story you have seen before. But it works here because the fear is specific. Satchell is not some abstract victim of organised crime; he is a working detective whose ordinary domestic life gets dragged directly into his job's worst corners. That is the trick of this opening night. It takes a procedural premise and makes the threat personal before the credits have properly settled.