Waking the Dead - 9 ª Season

Sarah Cavendish, who had to leave the anti-terrorist squad for undisclosed reasons, joins Boyd's team as they reopen the case of banker Donald Rees, missing for three years. They speak to his wife Julie, who has terminal cancer and her children Miranda and Toby, who report seeing an elderly couple in funeral black stalking them when Donald vanished. They learn that the Rees' other daughter died of cancer due to radiation at a local hospital. CCTV from 2007 reveals that the old couple approached Donald just before he disappeared, drawing out 100,000 pounds from the bank. They were the Geigers, who lost a son at the same hospital in the late 1980s and whose skeletons the team find. Then their house is torched, killing the policewoman guarding it.

Grace believes that Julie, the Geigers' babysitter when their son Andrew died, deliberately killed Andrew and exposed her daughter to radiation to gain sympathy for herself as she has a psychological condition which craves attention. This is confirmed when Una, a nurse at the hospital when Andrew died, tells Boyd that she had her suspicions and told her boyfriend Glenn Burke. Burke, however, put the Geigers up to haunting the Rees family to blackmail Donald into giving them money and killed the old couple when they decided to give it back. Una has survived an attempt to kill her by Burke, who torched the Geigers' house to destroy evidence linking them with him but Burke is then killed by Julie when he breaks into her house. The team are left with the possibility that Julie is not ill after all but that this is another attention-seeking ploy. If so, did she kill Donald when he found out what she had done?

Thirteen years after she was abducted, as a seven year old, from a care home, Claire Somers is murdered, her eyes gouged out. The abductor also gouged out the eyes on the corpse of Robert Fenchurch, the care home supervisor who tried to stop Claire's kidnapping. Prior to her death Claire had also abducted a young girl, Abigail Harding, and locked her in a cupboard, but, when quizzed by Boyd, Abigail can only tell him that she saw the Bagman, a child's fictional bogey figure known to her family. Clare was an escort and the team find that prostitution and drug peddling were rife in the care home in the 1980s. Clare also seemed to know Abigail's G.P. sister Teresa, who subsequently falls to her death from a balcony after seeing the Bagman. Peter Broading, the home's current manager, who was a resident aged twelve when Claire disappeared tells Boyd that his arms were cut by David Drew, another boy from the home, to punish him for colluding with Fenchurch in the prostitution ring. However Drew also went missing at the same time as Claire. Is he the Bagman?

Sarah finds a letter sent from Clare to her mother in 1989, three years after her abduction, stating that she was very happy. The team locate the house in which she lived in Sussex, now empty but with signs that children lived there. Grace discovers that several children were taken from the home, including Clare and David Drew, by social workers who feared for their welfare, David Drew gouging out Fenchurch's eyes after he was accidentally run over. The social workers are Leo and Karen Harding and their grown-up children are among those they saved. When Clare met Teresa she threatened to blow the whistle on them and was murdered, but by whom? And which of the Harding's boys is Drew?

In a sewer below Westminster workmen discover the skeleton of murdered Falklands hero turned peace campaigner Piers Kennedy, missing since 1983 after making anti-nuclear speeches. He was known to Grace, herself on a Government watch list for her anti-war views and she recalls his associates; Lucy Christie, the girlfriend he dumped for a fling with Bonnie Yorke, still the partner of fellow campaigner Ralph Palmer and the charming but volatile marine Murray. Other suspects number Lucy's father, now Lord Christie, whose dog's hairs were found on the corpse and former friend, the Russian Oleg, now employed by Lord Christie, who turned against Piers after the KGB killed his parents. Grace locates Murray, now a paranoid victim of post-traumatic stress, who gives her a tape allegedly showing that MoD police killed Piers. At the same time Eve, revisiting the sewer, is arrested by the same police and Defence minister Jane Hussey warns Boyd to go no further.