Harbinger (1)

Boyd is handed a new colleague at the start of Harbinger, and the timing could not be worse. Sarah Cavendish arrives with equal rank and a story nobody will tell: a high-flying career grounded by a failed operation that everyone pretends did not happen. Eva Birthistle plays her with a wariness that fits the unit's atmosphere, where trust is earned slowly and revoked quickly.

The case that brings them together is the sort of thing Boyd cannot walk away from. Banker Donald Rees vanished three years ago. His empty car has turned up, and his family are still waiting for an answer. Julie Rees has terminal cancer, which gives the whole search a clock it did not have before. She and the children, Miranda and Toby, talk about an elderly couple in funeral black who stalked them around the time Donald disappeared. CCTV from 2007 shows the same couple approaching him shortly before he vanished, after which he drew out a hundred thousand pounds.

And then the case goes somewhere darker. The couple were Ernst and Elsa Geiger, who lost a son at the local hospital in the late 1980s, the same hospital where the Rees family's other daughter died of radiation-linked cancer. The team find the Geigers' skeletons. Then the house goes up in flames, and the policewoman guarding it dies in the fire.

Barbara Machin and Ed Whitmore wrote it, with Marc Jobst directing. Trevor Eve's Boyd, Sue Johnston's Grace and Tara Fitzgerald's Eve are joined by Wil Johnson's Jordan, with Cecilia Noble as Una Mason, Sophie Winter-King as young Julie, Ian Hanmore and Amelda Brown as the Geigers and Graham Turner as Glenn Burke.

The episode starts as a favour to a dying woman and ends with a body count. That is Waking the Dead in one paragraph.