A Place of Execution ITV1, 9pm

Teleporting us seamlessly back and forth between now and 1963, Place of Execution's opening set up one enigma after another.

A compelling child-murder drama based on Val McDermid's novel piled riddle upon riddle, with nothing dully usual about its main suspects, most of whom remain half-hidden.

In addition to unravelling a 35-year-old whodunnit concerning the strange and terrible extinction of 13-year-old Alison Carter, the three-parter's under-pressure heroine, TV journalist Catherine Heathcote, was charged with solving various contemporary mysteries. The most pressing of these was how to keep her fragmenting family together.

Catherine's sullen, wayward teenage daughter, Sasha, moped about in alienated-adolescent style; drinking, vandalising shopping malls and getting arrested.

On top of that, Catherine's independent and somewhat snooty old mater refused to provide emergency childcare, while scornfully wondering why her daughter was soiling her big-time globe-trotting TV-journo reputation by fretting so obsessively about "a sordid and ghoulish little murder case."

As mater then added with a meaningful look: "Maybe you shouldn't go on digging." Played with just the right blend of driven exasperation and world weariness by Juliet Stevenson, Catherine replied: "But I will dig - it's what I do."

Yet why was she digging an old case so persistently, and cutting a few corners, truth-wise? And just how sordid and ghoulish was the original unsolved case?

Crucially, why did the case's life-long investigator, retired Chief Inspector George Bennett, suddenly phone to withdraw his co-operation from Catherine's forthcoming TV documentary at the very last minute? What did Bennett mean by his bitter, disillusioned and angry-sounding statement that the doc's screening would do more harm than good? Why did he belatedly admit that mistakes had been made? What flipping mistakes?

More to the point, why did we see the disillusioned Bennett sitting bitterly and angrily - and totally alone - in his car, on the very moorlands where the murder took place?

Surely, he's not going to end up committing suicide by hypothermia, like the case's first prime suspect?

Questions, dash it, questions!

It will be very sad if old George Bennett does top himself, broken by the case's confoundments, because you had to like eager idealistic young DI George Bennett, deftly played by Lee Ingleby, as he'd probed the case in 1963 as a wet-behind-the-ears graduate copper.

Naturally, diligent George had needed to overcome a bad new TV infection: call it the Life on Mars retro-macho virus. Back in the sixties, you see, his old-school colleagues had been a lazy bunch of neanderthal non-PC PCs, sarges and DCIs.

"Pull in the knicker-sniffer!" roared one brutishly, indicating that George should swiftly pin the crime on the nearest known sex offender, abandoning his poncey new-fangled university-derived approach to policing (ie, interviewing people, uncovering incontrovertible evidence, thereby establishing the truth).

Happily, George's energy and brains prevailed. He began using intuitive leftfield detective methods, like poring over photographs of 13-year-old Alison, taken by her oily stepfather, in which - strangely - she'd looked older and more knowing than her years.

George, it eventually emerged, knew that there are techniques for manipulating the apparent truth contained in photographs. As goggle-box watchers, I think we'll all need to keep our wits about us to stay in the picture...

david.belcher@theherald.co.ukdrum shrouded in mystery