The Colour of Amber

The fifth series opens in daylight with a child being taken, and the first three hours are the ones that matter. An eleven-year-old girl, Janita, is dragged kicking into a car from a housing estate, and Alex Fielding launches an Amber alert — a public appeal on a mass scale — while Tony Hill builds a profile of likely abductors. It is the most procedural episode the series made, and its tension comes from time and process rather than from insight.

Hill's first move is to rule out the obvious suspect: a paedophile recently re-homed on the estate, who prefers boys and who ends up in a police cell for his own protection as public anger builds. It is a decision that costs the investigation nothing and costs the man his safety, and the show is careful to note both. The appeal then produces no useful information at all, which is an honest outcome that most television avoids.

A distraught mother, Celeste, identifies the missing girl as her daughter. Janita should have been at school, and neither she nor her young friend Mikey turned up. Celeste is stricken because Janita's twin died in infancy, and the episode uses that history without exploiting it. Hill reasons that the abductor must know the area and the escape routes, but the searches find nothing. Then a detail that should have been decisive is noticed: although she struggled, Janita had the opportunity to run and did not take it. Which raises the question of whether she knew the person who took her. Her father and step-father both have alibis, and then Mikey, the last person to have seen her alive, is found trying to burn a blood-stained school uniform.

The episode's published synopsis notes that a twist changes the entire nature of the investigation and leads the two leads to realise they made a fundamental error at the outset. That admission is the film's real distinction. This series rarely allows its psychologist to be flatly mistaken, and here the error belongs to both of them and is structural rather than incidental — the kind of mistake that a faster, less careful investigation would not have made.

What the episode does less well is the boy with the uniform. It is a familiar red herring and it is resolved rather than subverted, which sits oddly with the film's otherwise serious interest in the fallibility of first hypotheses. The mother-and-daughter material carries more weight than the plot, and Celeste's fear of losing a second child is the emotional centre the episode builds around.

It drew 6.26 million viewers and is rated 8.1 by IMDb users, among the strongest of the Lahbib run. It is the best series opener since 2005 and it sets up the fifth series' interest in what the police do when the obvious answer is wrong — a question the next three films would ask in progressively darker registers.