Any drama serial being broadcast over five consecutive nights has to work very hard to hook the viewer immediately and maintain a decent level of either excitement, intrigue or both from the opening credits onwards. Injustice, ITV1’s new thriller from Collision writer Anthony Horowitz, just about manages to do both.
James Purefoy (Rome) stars as Will Travers, a defence barrister who – along with his wife Jane (Dervla Kirwan, who starred in BBC One’s five-nights-a-week offering The Silence last year) and daughter Kate (Lisa Diveney) – has left London after a nervous breakdown and since re-established his career in Ipswich, away from the pressures of the city and the serious criminal cases he now refuses to take on.
Having successfully defended a young black man accused of stealing money and medals from an elderly soldier, Travers is asked to return to London to take on precisely the kind of case he used to excel at but now avoids: a murder where the defendant is pleading not guilty. However, the accused is a former university friend (Nathaniel Parker) from whom Will ‘stole’ Jane twenty years earlier, and he decides he can’t say no. ‘Maybe I just owe him,’ he says to his wife when she protests his becoming involved. ‘He was my best friend; I hurt him.’
Meanwhile, local police are investigating the murder of John Jarrold (Robert Whitelock), an itinerant worker who is found, shot dead, amid a sea of bloody gore and buzzing flies in a dilapidated cottage on a farm in the Suffolk countryside. The oh-my-God-you-can-almost-smell-the-powder-burns-and-rotting-body-parts realism of the murder contrasts sharply and horribly with the beautifully desolate landscape surrounding the locus delicti, but it’s not the most shocking moment of the episode by a long way.
The candidates for that honour are all events that have taken place prior to Episode 1, unpleasant incidents that Will Travers can’t help remembering, in a series of flashbacks that are so complicated it takes a while to work out what’s happening and what’s already happened. Precisely what has occurred in the life of this oddly likeable barrister in the past is yet to be made clear, but one particular moment will have viewers scrambling for the rewind button or hastening over to ITV+1 at the end to re-watch an earlier scene. All is not what it seems, and things are certainly not well in the apparently idyllic life of the Travers family.
There are a few clunky moments in the script – the dialogue between Jane Travers and the security guard at the Young Offenders Institution where she teaches is riddled with creaking, prehistoric clichés about Guardian readers – and DI Mark Wenborn (Charlie Creed-Miles), the detective investigating the Jarrold murder, is so utterly unlikeable it’s not even possible to take any relish in despising him. ‘How’d you get to be such a bastard?’ a pathologist asks him. ‘Practice,’ the malevolent Mancunian replies.
Injustice successfully poses enough questions during this opening instalment to sufficiently interest the viewer in watching the subsequent episodes. However, whether it can satisfactorily answer the questions remains to be seen. In the case of this judiciary-based thriller, the jury is still out.
Airs at 9pm on Monday 6th June 2011 on ITV1.