Shadows Rising: Part 1

A young woman's body is pulled from a tarn in Northumberland, and the way she died leaves no doubt that she was killed with force. There is nothing else — no witness, no scene, no history. Tony Hill, brought onto the case by Assistant Chief Commissioner Brandon rather than by Carol Jordan, has nothing to work with either, and the episode is honest about that for a long stretch. The first half of Shadows Rising is about the difficulty of starting, which is rarer in this genre than it should be.

The complication is structural. Jordan is taken off the murder enquiry and sent to deal with a stalking campaign against Jack and Amanda Vance, a pair of television hosts who believe someone is following them. That leaves Hill in charge of a murder investigation he has no authority to run, and Jordan dealing with a case that looks trivial until it very obviously is not. Doon Mackichan and John Michie play the Vances as people whose professional warmth has curdled under pressure, and the casting of Mackichan — then known almost entirely for comedy — against the show's prevailing grimness is one of the more interesting decisions of the first series.

The two cases are kept apart for an hour, and the episode's suspense comes from the audience being able to see what the characters cannot: that a pair of investigations running in parallel in a show with a body count are almost certainly one investigation. Alan Whiting's script adapts McDermid's second Tony Hill novel, the one that gave the series its title, and it uses the adaptation's freedom to make the connection between the dead girls and the Vance household arrive as a discovery rather than a deduction.

The episode also deepens the partnership by testing it from outside. Hill and Jordan spend most of the hour apart, working cases that do not touch, and the strain between them is the effect of the separation rather than of anything either of them does. That is a more interesting way to complicate a relationship than an argument, and it pays off in the second part.

Nicholas Laughland's direction makes the most of the Northumberland locations, and the opening sequence at the tarn is the strongest piece of image-making in the first series — a landscape that looks like it is keeping a secret and a body that has been left in it deliberately. The production used Eshott Hall in Northumberland for the Vance house, and the contrast between the two settings does a lot of the episode's work, moving between a rural body-dump and a domestic interior where a different kind of violence is being planned.

The part drew 6.38 million viewers. It is a middle chapter and it reads like one — the Vances' stalking campaign is genuinely unsettling but the two plots only cohere at the very end, and an audience watching week by week in 2002 had a long wait to find out whether the wait was worth it. The next instalment answers that.