Burn Out (1)

A woman sets fire to an abandoned car, then stands there photographing it while it burns. Boyd happens to be walking past and tackles her clear of the possible explosion, which is a striking way to open the first proper series. The woman is Marina Coleman, and the spot she chose isn't random: her father died in a car crash on that same stretch of street a few years earlier, and she has never accepted that it was an accident.

Officially this isn't a cold case at all. Nobody filed it away and forgot it; the coroner did his job and everyone moved on. Boyd takes it anyway, out of curiosity and perhaps something less professional, and that reluctance-into-obsession is one of the episode's better threads. Then Frankie runs her tests on the dead man's car and produces the sort of finding nobody wants: he was still alive after the crash, and could have got out. Which raises an ugly question the family would rather not ask. If he could have escaped the burning wreck, why didn't he?

The Coleman family gathers around the case like weather. Clive Russell's Perry, Ralph Brown's Mike and Beverly Hills' Gwen all have their own versions of what happened, and Angela Griffin plays Marina as someone who has been quietly right for years while everyone around her agreed to be wrong. Simon Kunz is DAC Christie, with Sue Johnston, Holly Aird, Claire Goose and Wil Johnson making up the usual squad. Peter Jukes and Barbara Machin wrote it; Edward Bennett directed.

What I like most here is the scale of it. A burnt-out car on an ordinary street, a daughter with a camera, and from that small unlovely beginning the team unpicks something that was buried with the victim. The episode trusts that grief makes its own motive, and it's right.