Redemption

Redemption opens with a child found dead in a deserted warehouse, killed by an overdose of sedatives, and nobody able to say whether it was suicide or murder. That ambiguity is the episode's engine. Carol Jordan calls Hill in to advise, then is hospitalised after a mugging, and her new boss, ACC Paul Eden, places Kevin Geoffries in charge of the case — the first time the series puts the sergeant in a position of real authority, and a reminder of how thin the team's bench has become.

Two more missing children are found dead in different parts of Bradfield, and it becomes clear that the bodies are being placed at specific sites. Hill realises the killer is not simply killing but telling the police something about his own past, and that the placement of the bodies is the message. It is a strong idea and Guy Burt's script uses it properly: the sites are the investigation, and the episode's geography does the work that a confession would ordinarily do.

Hill's reading that the killer is luring unhappy children into trust focuses suspicion on a local minister named Michael, whom Hill believes has abused a young acolyte, Julie. Michael is arrested. The murders continue. Hill then reassesses: these are crimes of love and loyalty, committed by someone who believes he is righting wrongs and continuing work begun years earlier. With the minister's Christian website at the centre of the investigation, Hill has to pose as a young victim to reach the latest abducted boy, which requires Jordan to trust him and the killer to believe him.

The episode is the first in the series to repeat the avenging-killer premise of Justice Painted Blind at feature length, and it does so more effectively for having more room. The killer who believes he is alleviating suffering is a more troubling figure than a monster, and the religious framing gives the show a language for it that it had not previously had. Burt's script is also unusual in the run for how much of Hill's work is shown as performance — the posing, the calculated vulnerability — rather than inference.

Peter Sullivan joins as ACC Paul Eden, replacing Tom Chadbon's Brandon, and the change is immediate. Eden is described as college-educated, fast-tracked, focused and practical, demanding tangible results and wary of Hill's cerebral methods. He is not a villain; he is a manager, and the show is clearer than most that a manager's scepticism can be as damaging as outright obstruction.

The episode won Guy Burt the 2006 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Television Episode Teleplay, which is worth noting because it was awarded by the Mystery Writers of America and went to an episode not adapted from a novel. It drew 7.12 million viewers, the series' best figure of 2005, and it reset the show's command politics in a way that would last three more series.