Conviction (1)

Six years is a long time for a body to wait for a name. The young man pulled from the reservoir has sat unidentified for all that time, until Eve Lockhart matches the DNA to Karl Barclay, a medical student who vanished without a word. Boyd smells a cover-up from the first press of the file, and the case gives him plenty to sniff at.

The Barclay family are the kind of household the series loves and dreads. Gideon, the father, receives the news with a stillness that borders on the unnatural. His wife Lisbetta is another matter. She has convinced herself that her son brought Beelzebub into the house when he converted to Islam, and every later discovery is filtered through that superstition. Karl's brother Jakob and his ex-girlfriend Naz both mention letters Karl sent before he disappeared. Eve thinks they are forgeries. Then comes the detail that makes the whole team sit up: Karl's body was cremated only days after it was found, which is not how these things usually go.

The family garden tells its own story. Lisbetta has buried some of Karl's belongings there, a train ticket to Manchester and a photograph of Karl with his Muslim friends. But when the diggers turn them up, she unravels completely, and in the fallout she stabs Gideon while declaring that she killed Karl too. Sarah Cavendish, meanwhile, finds Karl's name on a watch list of suspected terrorists, which looks less like a lead and more like a mother's paranoia turned into paperwork.

Barbara Machin and Timothy Prager wrote it, with Tim Fywell directing. Trevor Eve's Boyd, Sue Johnston's Grace, Tara Fitzgerald's Eve, Wil Johnson's Jordan and Eva Birthistle's Cavendish work the case, with Don Warrington as Gideon, Claire Benedict as Lisbetta, Babatunde Aleshe as Karl, Karen Cogan as the community support officer and Junade Khan as Mohammed.

Everything important in this case comes out of the ground: the body, the belongings, the family's secrets. The reservoir was only the beginning.