91Èȱ¬

Episode One - Sunday 28 August at 9.30pm on 91Èȱ¬ ONE

A young woman, Isabel Price, lays down her bracelet and climbs onto a ledge. A cityscape of London spreads out in front of her.

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She takes short, terrified breaths as she turns her head, looks and then falls into the stillness of the day.

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Three weeks later. The quiet of a suburban London street at night is fractured by the sound of Jack Price, Isabel's father, hammering on the front door of his own home.

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Inside, his son Daniel comforts his sister Jacqueline whilst his wife, Rachel, tries to blot out Jack's drunken, anguished cries and reaches for the phone.

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DCI Red Metcalfe takes the call from Rachel as he and DI Duncan Warren are leaving the station.

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Jack and Rachel Price are colleagues of Red's - Rachel is the police pathologist, Jack a Detective Sergeant. Red tells Rachel he's on his way over.

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Red arrives at the Prices' to find Jack, emotionally spent, slumped on the doorstep. As he reaches out for Red's help, all Jack can utter is the question that has haunted him for weeks - "Why did Izzy do it, Red?"

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Having reassured Rachel and Daniel that he will take care of Jack and get him on duty at the station the following day, Red drives Jack away from his family, torn apart by grief.

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A landfill site. The air is full of the cries of gulls. Duncan Warren and new team member DS Vickie Clarke walk towards an abandoned van. The door is locked, the windows dark and the sound of angry buzzing comes from inside.

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Red joins Duncan and Vickie to discover that their first victim is a young woman, Catherine McArdle.

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They find her in the front seat, her hands gaffer-taped to the steering wheel, knee-deep in writhing maggots and her face and neck swollen with stings from the hundreds of bees that filled the van.

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A piece of gaffer tape hangs from her mouth and her wrists have been slashed. On the windscreen Duncan sees SAVE ME written in blood.

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Catherine was a student at the University of London, the university that Rachel's daughter Isabel attended. Red tries to deter Rachel from dealing with this case, fearing it will remind her of the death of her daughter.

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But Rachel's professionalism allows her to separate the two cases in her mind. Not so her husband Jack, who is still tormented by his daughter's death and who becomes obsessed that she was the killer's first victim - despite clear and incontrovertible evidence that she committed suicide.

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Jack's grief is wrecking his life and impeding Red's investigation.

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The car Catherine was found in leads them to a terminally ill woman in a hospice - Claire Fullerton. They find her lying dead, pumped full of morphine.

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SAVE ME is written in blood on the curtains round her bed. In Claire Fullerton's room, Red finds a video: it shows two women gagged and bound in the back of a van.

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As the team desperately try to find the van and save the two women, Rachel, Jack and Daniel Price attend the inquest into Isabel's death. Jack gets violent and has to be thrown out of the court when the Coroner delivers the verdict of suicide.

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Red's team find the women from the video hanging from a railway arch, joined together by meat hooks. A man's ring has been placed on one of their fingers. Inside the van, scrawled in blood, are the words SAVE ME.