Sins (1)

Human remains surface in an urban canal, and they turn out to belong to a prison governor: the head warden of an institution for sexual predators, decapitated years ago and dumped where nobody would look. That is the case Sins (1) hands the Cold Case team, and it is one of the grimmer openings the show has managed. The canal water is cold in more ways than one.

The victim's line of work does most of the storytelling here. A man who ran a prison full of sexual offenders was never short of people with reasons to want him dead, and the investigation turns up suspects whose histories are every bit as sordid as the setting implies. The difficulty for Spencer Jordan and the others isn't finding motives. It's having too many. Everyone connected to the governor had something to hide, which makes sorting genuine grievance from ordinary prison-grade spite a slow, unpleasant job.

Barbara Machin and Declan Croghan wrote it, Daniel Percival directed. Trevor Eve is back as DSI Peter Boyd, joined by Sue Johnston as Dr Grace Foley, Tara Fitzgerald as Dr Eve Lockhart, Wil Johnson as DI Spencer Jordan and Félicité Du Jeu as DC Stella Goodman. The guest list gives the case its faces: George Rainsford as Luke Boyd, Ruth Gemmell as Linda Cummings, David Schofield as Michael Kelleher, Michael Maloney as Dr Damien Hooper and Alexandra Moen as Cathy Reading.

The Luke Boyd casting deserves a mention, since anything touching Boyd's family tends to be where this show keeps its sharpest knives. Part one plants that thread without pulling it yet.

As first halves go, this one leans heavily on atmosphere, and it earns it. There is something about crimes tied to institutions that suits Waking the Dead particularly well, because institutions are exactly the kind of witness that never talks. Files go missing. Staff close ranks. The dead man himself ran a place built on secrets, so it is fitting that his own murder turns out to be wrapped in them. By the end of the hour the team has suspects, theories and no shortage of things they'd rather not know.