Duty and Honour(1)

Someone digging in the woods turns up a mummified hand, and that single grim find is enough to set the whole story of Duty and Honour (1) in motion. The trail leads the Cold Case squad to a military academy nearby, an institution with the unlovely sideline of training mercenaries to fight in Iraq. Before long it is clear the hand belongs somewhere in a cover-up of a genuinely major incident, and that nobody at the academy is in a hurry to help.

The show has always been good on institutions that close ranks, and a private military outfit gives it fresh material. The police are outsiders here in every sense: no jurisdictional comfort, no cooperative witnesses, just young men trained for contract war and older men whose careers depend on certain things staying buried. Boyd, as usual, responds to stonewalling by leaning harder, which rarely ends quietly.

Barbara Machin and Adrian Mead wrote it, Robert Bierman directed. Trevor Eve leads as DSI Peter Boyd, with 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 academy side of the story is populated by Jamie Sives as Rob Lomax, Nicholas Farrell as Douglas Malham, Luke Bailey as Paul Overton, Richard Riddell as Andy Tyrrel and Elliott Jordan as Mark Bennet.

What makes this two-parter's opening work is the collision of worlds. A mummified hand in English woodland feels like classic cold case territory, all quiet lanes and old secrets. Iraq-era mercenaries feel like a different, louder programme entirely. Part one spends its time showing these belong to each other, tracing how a training ground for foreign wars leaves bodies in domestic soil.

It is pointed viewing for its era too, arriving when the private-military business was very much a live controversy. The episode doesn't editorialise heavily; it lets the institutional evasions do the arguing. By the end of the hour the team knows there was an incident, knows it was covered up, and has exactly one severed hand to prove any of it.