Catherine Heathcote (Juliet Stevenson) has a wayward teenage daughter from a failed marriage. Retrieving the girl from the police cells where she spent the night sleeping off a drunken rampage, and watching her walk away promising to spend the day at her gran’s, draws a painful parallel for Catherine with the night 13-year-old Alison Carter walked out of her house never to return. Catherine is in the middle of shooting a retrospective documentary on the case – now over 40 years old – and things are not going too well.

Place of Execution is another drama told in retrospect, jumping from Heathcote’s examination of the facts to the unravelling of those facts and back again. In this case, it’s easy to tell which era you’re in. In the 60s, everyone is smoking. Vast billowing clouds of blue cigarette smoke obscure every scene and the camera lovingly zooms in on each character as they suck the very last microgram of nicotine from their dog ends, or place them carefully in an ashtray so that nothing is wasted. This is poignantly evocative stuff, accurately realised. Back then cigarettes were relatively expensive. You didn’t see people taking one or two puffs and then throwing the fag away like an unwanted gift. Not unless they were seriously wealthy or trying to give the impression of wealth.

Here, even the languid Philip Hawkin – Alison’s step-father – who lives in the Manor House cannot afford to throw his nub-ends away until they’re so short he can’t hold on to them any longer.

Even without the ubiquitous cancer sticks, the aura of the 60s is wonderfully recreated. Everything was so… unsophisticated back then. Alison’s bedroom looks as though it’s been designed for someone much older with its paisley pattern wallpaper, heavy wooden furniture and drab colours. But children weren’t catered for as a special marketing group in those days. They did as they were told, and took what they were given. Hard to believe now, when the yoof market is so vibrant and well-targeted. The police plod stoically through their case, not worrying too much about contaminating evidence at crime scenes or applying methods.

“Mistakes were made,” senior investigating officer DI George Bennett admits to Catherine Heathcote years later, suffering suddenly and inexplicably from an attack of cold feet, and withdrawing his permission to appear in the documentary. His subsequent high-profile policing career was launched off the back of the Alison Carter disappearance, and yet there’s clearly something not quite right about it. Something he’s hiding.

This opening episode sowed the seeds of suspicion among a handful of characters. Alison’s stepfather appears to have an unhealthy obsession with photographing her, although perhaps his obsession is with the photography itself and Alison just happens to be a readily-available subject. And why is schoolmate Charlie Lomas’s face scratched off a school photo in Alison’s bedroom? Does it have anything to do with the private gallery of her photos he has secreted in the back of his wardrobe?

Bennett himself is not above suspicion when Catherine discovers he had a penchant for doctoring photographs. In an old university pamphlet, he wrote an article in which he swapped the heads of Churchill and Stalin on a wartime photograph.

The obviously too-obvious suspect, child abuser Simon Crowther, is briefly investigated but rapidly takes himself out of the frame by walking out onto the moors and dying of exposure. But when Old Ma Lomas – the kind of Shakespearian cauldron-stirrer every crime story should have living in its sleepy village – tells the police they’ve missed a bit in their search of the moors, George Bennett uncovers a horrific scene in a disused mineshaft. A pool of fresh blood lying next to a discarded stocking of the sort worn by Alison Carter.

So far so good. ITV’s replacement for The Children in the Monday night drama slot is well-crafted and – it almost goes without saying – well written (based, as it is, on Val McDermid’s novel and adapted for TV by Patrick Harbinson) with just enough mystery to keep the audience guessing, just enough pace to keep us from falling asleep and just enough nostalgia to appeal to 60s children and fans of Heartbeat, Z Cars and Softly, Softly. I’ll be sticking with it for the next couple of weeks, but if it turns out to have another damp squib of an ending there’ll be trouble. You know, 60s-style trouble. Being sent to bed with no supper, to a room with no TV. That kind of thing.