Justice Painted Blind: Part 1

An eleven-year-old girl is taken from the street and a young woman is strangled, and both crimes drag up the murder of Trudy Hibbert three years earlier. The man suspected of killing Trudy, Paul Gregory, was acquitted, and everyone in Bradfield — police, neighbours, the tabloids the show never quite shows — is certain he did it and is doing it again. Justice Painted Blind is about what happens when the obvious suspect is the wrong one, and it is the first episode of the series to make the victim pattern itself the puzzle.

That is the episode's genuinely novel idea. Hill cannot construct a psychological type for the killer because the victims do not share one. They are old and young, black and white, and the more there are, the wider the range becomes. Where the standard profiler would read a widening victim pool as evidence of no pattern at all, Hill reads it as the pattern: whoever is doing this is not selecting for a preference, they are selecting for something else entirely, and a bizarre link between the cases suggests the deaths will continue.

Alan Whiting's script is the series' first original teleplay with no novel behind it, and it shows in the plotting. The false-suspect strand around Gregory is the most conventional thing in either of the first two stories, and the episode spends a lot of its first half establishing that he did not do it in a way that most viewers will have guessed before the police do. What saves it is the interrogation of certainty: the episode is not interested in whether Gregory is guilty of anything, it is interested in why everybody is so sure.

The episode also introduces a third presence into the Hill–Jordan axis for the first time. Jordan's new boyfriend, Spencer, is a lawyer with his own theory of the case, and his function is to be plausible and wrong in a way that neither of the leads can dismiss. He is not a rival exactly, but the show uses him as a measure of how much of Jordan's judgement is committed to Hill, and the answer is uncomfortable for everyone.

The part drew 6.93 million viewers. The title is doing real work — justice, in this story, has been attempted by people who cannot see what they are doing, the courts included. It is the first time the series states its interest in vigilantism, a theme it would return to at much greater length with Redemption in 2005, and the comparison is instructive: this version has a sharper premise and softer execution.

There is one unresolved oddity worth flagging for anyone cross-referencing the show. The episode's cast includes three members of the Hibbert family — Trudy, who is dead before the story begins, and Nicola and Oliver — and the published material does not establish how they relate to one another. It is a small gap in a script that is otherwise unusually careful about the mechanics of grief.