Happy Families

A schoolgirl's body in a cupboard in the science lab, found the morning after the school disco. That is how "Happy Families" begins, and the first question is the obvious one: did Ruth Penrose kill herself, or did someone help her along? The caretaker makes the discovery, and before long Wycliffe is picking at the softer edges of teenage life in a Cornish school.

Ruth's only real friend, by most accounts, was Danny Whear, the caretaker's son. That looks bad, and then worse: Danny vanishes as soon as the questions start. Ruth's twin sister Sheena is quick to point the finger at him, though nobody pretends the sisters were close, and the episode leaves you to wonder whether a lost sister's love can curdle into murder. Wycliffe works through the families and the friendships, sifting the versions of events that teenagers tell adults, and the case sits stubbornly somewhere between accident and killing. Sheena's certainty is the only clean thing in it.

W.J. Burley and Sian Orrells wrote it, Steve Goldie directed. Aired in the summer of 1995, it belongs to the show's second series. Jo Stafford is Sheena, Mark Aldridge is Danny; Dominic Guard plays Mick Brandon. Carole Gill, Zoe Hembrough and Tim Wylton fill out the supporting ranks, and Jimmy Yuill's Kersey and Helen Masters's Lane back up Jack Shepherd's Wycliffe as he untangles it all, quietly, the way he always does.

The happy families of the title turn out to be the usual fiction: what teenagers show their parents and what actually happens behind it. The episode takes the school disco and the friendships that fray around it seriously, and it treats the girls at the centre like people rather than plot. But its real trick is making you care about a girl you never met. The episode never quite says which way it falls, and that feels right. Not every case needs a monster. Some just need someone patient enough to listen.