Blue Murder
Monday 3 December 2007 9:00pm - 10:30pm on ITV1.

Janine (Caroline Quentin) and the team are out on a rare Friday night celebrating a good result in court. She leaves early and runs straight into the fallout from a stabbing in a nearby bar. The attack has left an 18 year-old young black man lying dead in a city centre alleyway. He is identified by his wallet as Dwayne Kent.

At first it seems like a random racist attack, and with a crime scene contaminated by drunken weekend revellers, it’s the most difficult of crimes to investigate. Janine calls the team away from the pub to get a head start on the investigation and comes across Dwayne’s distressed younger brother Caleb (Luke Bailey).

She discovers that Dwayne Kent had been a promising youth-team footballer only months away from joining a Premiership club. He had been out celebrating his nineteenth birthday the night he was killed. Could this be a grudge killing from one of his team-mates, jealous of his imminent rise to Beckham status?

Dwayne’s parents are in great shock, meanwhile his two brothers Caleb and Lee (Kenny Thompson) have to be separated in a heated row while Richard (Ian Kelsey) and Janine are visiting. The detectives also meet Dwayne’s girlfriend Debbie (Davinia Anderson), who is extremely close to his family.

Shap (Nicholas Murchie) is suspicious that the team are not being told the full story and his hunch seems to have been proved correct when Dwayne’s father Colin (Robbie Gee) is tracked to the home of sports agent Chris Milligan (Thomas Craig) and a fight breaks out.
Further secrets emerge when a young glamorous woman Kelly arrives on the doorstep looking for Dwayne and identifying herself as his girlfriend, much to Debbie’s surprise. When Kelly also reveals that Dwayne had a swish city centre apartment, Janine has to wonder how much else she has to uncover about this young player.

At Dwayne’s club, manager Dave Stone says that in the previously close-knit young team rifts had begun to develop between players who were clearly going to make the cut and turn pro and those who were destined, like Dwayne’s elder brother Lee, to return to the anonymity of normal life.

Two players in particular seem to have distanced themselves from Dwayne and didn't attend his birthday celebrations. Has resentment of Dwayne’s imminent fame prompted his killing by a team-mate or even his older brother? Lee’s gone missing from the family home, and Caleb admits that Lee had not been asleep (as he’d claimed) in the bar around the time of the attack.

Lee turns up at his brother’s funeral. He confesses to arguing with his brother on the night of the killing but claims he has been ‘fitted up’ when the murder weapon (a steak knife from the bar) is found under the floor of his bedroom with some stolen sportswear.

It seems that the investigating team have their man until the police trace Adele Chambers (Kate Ford) a married mum who is a potential witness seen getting into an unlicensed cab near the attack on Dwayne. On questioning Adele accuses Dwayne of raping her at his city centre apartment, giving her a possible motive for the killing.

But there's a further twist when Janine realises that the man she accuses of attacking her is actually Dwayne’s brother Caleb. It seems he has been impersonating his talented older brother to live a fantasy life as a football starlet and Adele has finally exposed his charade when she confronted him at the bar.

The final scenes are set for a violent confrontation as Janine and Richard trace Caleb to Wayne’s apartment to force him to face up to the truth about his brother’s death.