The Mermaids Singing: Part 1

Three men have been abducted in Bradfield and tortured to death with instruments that belong in a museum, and the bodies have been left where gay men meet. The city's gay community is frightened, the force is under pressure, and nobody with a rank is willing to say the word serial. DCI Carol Jordan brings in a clinical psychologist to say it for them, which is the first thing that marks Wire in the Blood as a different sort of detective drama. Dr Tony Hill is not a consultant with an office and a fee. He is a man who has spent his career talking to killers who are already locked up, and he has never had to work a case where the offender is still out.

That reversal is the engine of the opening story. Hill's usefulness is not that he knows more than the police. It is that he can read a body as a sentence, and the police find that both impressive and offensive. The Bradfield force's position, stated plainly by the men who outrank Jordan, is that Hill tells them nothing they do not already know. Then a police officer becomes the fourth victim, and the argument about whether the killings are linked stops being academic.

Patrick Harbinson's script, adapted from Val McDermid's first Tony Hill novel, spends its running time establishing a method rather than solving a case. Hill studies the placement of the bodies and the particular way the torture has been done, and concludes that the killer is communicating rather than simply expressing something. The police read the dump sites as a hate crime against gay men; Hill reads them as a message addressed to someone specific. Both readings survive to the second part, and the tension between them is what keeps the episode moving.

Robson Green had the harder job here than anywhere else in the run, because the character had to be strange without becoming a joke. He built Hill out of research, spending time with the criminal psychologist Julian Boon and taking from him the detail that becomes the character's signature — the plastic bag he carries everywhere, holding what appears to be his entire life. Green plays the intelligence as a burden rather than a gift: Hill talks in a rattling, self-directed patter, and the only person who seems comfortable listening to it is Jordan.

The episode is a two-part story, and it behaves like one. Its business is to establish Hill's method, the partnership that makes it usable, and the institutional resistance that will frustrate it for six series. That is a lot of groundwork, and the plotting suffers slightly for it — the first part ends on Hill becoming the killer's target, which is a strong hook but also the point at which the episode stops investigating and starts threatening.

What the first part does convey, better than any of its successors manage, is how much the show was prepared to show. Four national reviewers saw the same episode in November 2002 and three of them objected to the detail of the torture. The Daily Telegraph called the brutality "sometimes undeniably gratuitous". The Times found the crimes "gratuitous and almost banal". Only the Guardian's Nancy Banks-Smith, who admitted she would not have watched it for pleasure, identified what would turn out to be the show's saving grace: Green's gift for light comedy, which arrives just often enough to make the darkness bearable. The premiere drew 8.08 million viewers. It is not the best episode of the series, but it is the one that explains why there were thirty more.