Walking on Water (1)

A man is cleared at appeal for the murder of his adoptive father, a fisherman, killed ten years earlier. Open and shut, says the court. Boyd doesn't buy it. Walking on Water (1) spends its first half testing that instinct, and the show is smart enough to leave open whether he's right or simply unable to let a conviction go.

The complication is the family. To settle whether the man is innocent, the squad has to find the rest of the Lovells, and there's a large inheritance waiting for whoever's left standing, which means everybody involved appears to have something worth hiding. Then there's the detail that raises the stakes from sad to sinister: three female members of the family disappeared at the same time as the murder, and nobody has ever accounted for them.

Barbara Machin and Simon Mirren wrote it, Andy Hay directed. Craig Kelly plays Mark, with Alan McKenna as Martin Lovell, Ian Burfield as Stephen Lovell, Lorraine Pilkington as Mandy Lovell, and Alan Ford bringing proper menace as Jack Ely. The regulars do their usual work: Sue Johnston as Dr Grace Foley, Holly Aird as Dr Frankie Wharton, Claire Goose as DC Amelia Silver, Wil Johnson as DS Spencer Jordan, Trevor Eve glowering productively at the centre.

What I enjoy here is the reversal of the show's usual shape. Normally Waking the Dead exhumes old tragedies; this time the legal system has already spoken, and the squad is arguing with it. DNA evidence versus Boyd's gut makes for a decent contest, and the episode refuses to tell you which one to trust.

There's a pleasing bleakness to the Lovells too, all secrets and money and silences, the sort of clan where an inheritance functions as a motive for everything. By the closing credits the case has stopped being about one dead fisherman entirely. Something much bigger went wrong in this family, and the sea keeps not giving up its answers.