Deathwatch (1)

A deathbed confession is where this one starts, and Harry Newman makes it a good one: twelve "unauthorised killings", a phrase that stops Dr Grace Foley mid-thought. His account links the hanging of an East End gangster to the assassination of the jury that convicted him, which is the sort of claim you'd expect from a dying man's meanderings. Boyd and the team are tempted to file it exactly that way.

Then Frankie Wharton looks at the body and finds Newman was murdered. So much for writing him off. A man killed to stop him talking is a man who was telling the truth, or close enough to make the squad's week very difficult, and the investigation tips into London's gangland crime families as a result.

The trail keeps widening. There's a thread leading back to a famous fifties trial in which a gangster went to the gallows for killing two policemen, and suddenly the cold case has roots in a piece of legal history everyone thought was settled decades ago. That's the show at its best, I think: a body in the present opening a door onto something the establishment would much rather leave shut. Grace gets to be intrigued rather than merely clinical, which is always worth watching, and the episode gives the whole team room to work before the cliffhanger arrives.

Maurice Phillips directed, with Stephen Davis and Barbara Machin sharing the writing credit. Trevor Eve heads the cast as Boyd, alongside Sue Johnston, Holly Aird, Claire Goose and Wil Johnson. The guests are strong: David Hemmings as Malcolm Finlay, William Armstrong as Graham Barker, David de Keyser as Marcus Freeman, David Ashton as Father Cameron, and Howard Goorney as Harold Newman, who gets the whole thing rolling from a hospital bed.

As a first half it does its job properly. Old secrets, a murdered informant and a hanging that may have been a miscarriage all get laid on the table, and you're left waiting for the second part to pick them up.