The Blind Beggar (1)

Workmen burrowing under the crypt of a Catholic church find a young man's skeleton sealed in concrete, buried with the accoutrements of certain Catholic rituals. And with the body, a message written in Braille: a passage from one of St Paul's letters to the Corinthians. It's a genuinely strange opening, the kind of find that sits between crime and sacrament and refuses to settle on either side.

The squad's first job is the plain one: work out who he was. But the details keep pulling the other way. A body buried in concrete under a church was never meant to be found, and the team comes round to exactly that suspicion, that the whole arrangement was deliberate. Somebody wanted this man underground with scripture pressed into his hands, readable only by touch. Whether that was devotion, guilt or a very dark joke is the question the episode dangles and doesn't answer yet, which is fair enough for a first half.

The church setting earns its keep. Forensics usually happens in strip-lit labs where the dead are just evidence, and here the work keeps brushing against something the team can't test. Grace Foley in particular seems to feel the weight of it. There's a good tension between Boyd's flat procedural instincts and the priestly gravity everyone else keeps bringing into the room.

Barbara Machin and John Milne wrote it, Robert Knights directed. Trevor Eve leads as Boyd, with Sue Johnston's Grace Foley, Holly Aird's Frankie Wharton, Claire Goose's Amelia Silver and Wil Johnson's Spencer Jordan. Annette Crosbie plays Moira Bowen, James Hayes is James Bowen, Con O'Neill plays Colm Hare, and Peter Warnock and Barry Morse appear as Father Kevin Ryan and Father Sebastian Stuart respectively.

As a mystery box, this one is well made. A corpse, a crypt and a verse in Braille is a lot of atmosphere to hand out in an opening hour, and the episode spends it carefully rather than all at once. The blind leading the buried, more or less.