Skin (1)

An anonymous email tips off the team, and it sends them to a patch of waste ground in east London where they find the desiccated, mummified body of a young man. He was a member of a racist skinhead organisation, and he was murdered in 1990. Nobody reported him missing. Nobody looked. That is the case Skin (1) sets before the Cold Case squad, and it is a sour one.

There is a deliberate irony in the title, since skin is what the show works with, and here the victim's skinhead politics are the first thing everyone reaches for. A dead fascist is not going to attract much public sympathy, and the episode is honest about that: the team has to investigate a man whose beliefs they'd find repugnant, and work out whether that matters. The answer the story keeps circling is that a murder is a murder, but the world he moved in is full of people who had reasons.

Clive Bradley, Declan Croghan and Barbara Machin wrote it, Edward Bennett 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. Around the case sit Philip Whitchurch as Jim Brown, Jo Woodcock as Natalie Brown, Cyril Nri as Raymond Ayanike, John Dougall as Terry Wilson, and Johnny Palmiero in the double role of George and Sam.

The 1990 setting gives the writers a lot to work with. That was the era when far-right street politics were a genuine presence in London, and the episode treats the period as a character in its own right rather than a backdrop. The people who knew the victim have had eighteen years to decide what they remember, and the gap between what they say and what happened is where the drama lives.

As first halves go, this is a strong setup: an unsympathetic victim, a hostile witness pool and a body that has been waiting a long time to be found. Part one asks who wanted him dead. Part two presumably asks the harder question, which is who didn't.