Care (1)

Care opens with a body that has been through a great deal: Claire Somers, found stabbed and incinerated, thirteen years after she was taken from a care home at the age of seven. Her eyes had been gouged out, and so had Robert Fenchurch's, the supervisor who tried to stop her kidnapping and paid for it the same night. Whatever took Claire that night in 1986 has a signature, and the team know it immediately.

The investigation digs through decades of rot at the home. Prostitution and drug peddling ran through the place in the 1980s, and Claire herself worked as an escort. She had also snatched a fifteen-year-old girl, Abigail Harding, and left her locked in a hotel room. When Boyd questions her, Abigail can only talk about the Bagman, a bogey figure from family storytelling. The detail stays with you, because children do not invent monsters like that without a reason. Claire also knew Abigail's sister Teresa, a GP, and Teresa's fall from a balcony after a Bagman sighting gives the case a second death to answer for.

Peter Broading, who runs the home now, was a twelve-year-old resident when Claire vanished. His arms were cut by David Drew, another boy, punishment for colluding with Fenchurch in the prostitution ring. Drew disappeared at the same time as Claire. But the questions line up: is Drew the Bagman, and did he come back?

Barbara Machin and Richard Warlow wrote it, with Edward Bennett directing. Trevor Eve's Boyd, Sue Johnston's Grace, Tara Fitzgerald's Eve, Wil Johnson's Jordan and Eva Birthistle's Cavendish work the present-day case, while the children of 1986 are played by Betsy Clark as young Claire, Niamh Dooner as young Teresa Harding, Danny Emes as young David Drew, Callum O'Donnell as young Tom Harding and Tim Parker as Fenchurch.

The episode makes its point quietly: institutions remember. The old offences were buried, but they have been surfacing in fragments ever since.