Meanwhile, Lennox’s sidekick Amanda (Joanna Vanderham) is an underwritten cipher, there to stand up to the old guard’s unthinking sexism and show that the programme makers had heard of #MeToo. Bob (Ken Stott), Lennox’s boss and chief superintendent, is resistant to plausible theories and viable suspects to the point of idiocy, which is as frustrating and wearying to the viewer as ever. However, this means there is little to offset the disappointment offered by the conventional nature of the narrative. It is not, of course, Welsh’s fault that – bar the occasional dramatisation of Lennox’s inner wish to scream in his superiors’ faces – there is none of the stylistic flair with which Welsh’s output is often linked, thanks to Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting. Is he right? Or is he blinkered, driven not by evidence but by whatever demons also drove him to addiction, and which were born – if his unbidden flashbacks are anything to go by – of unspeakable events in his childhood? Lennox thinks the police got the wrong man. Lennox becomes increasingly convinced that Britney was taken by a killer called Mr Confectioner, who was responsible for the disappearance of several girls before he was caught and imprisoned. The suspects are Britney’s grandfather (who “beasted” – molested – Britney’s mother when she was young) and her father, a local sex offender, both of whom are traced and dismissed. The seven-year-old has been snatched in a CCTV blind spot by a man and bundled into his white van, her fate revealed in a hauntingly beautiful and awful scene on Calton Hill at the National Monument in the closing moments of the first episode. Lennox becomes the lead investigator in the case of a missing child, Britney Hamil.
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March 2023
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