CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews The Vanishings: A mix of The Bill and a horror movie, this Irish crime drama has me gripped

Rating:. Tattoos don’t come with a spellchecker. And now that social media has made semi-literacy normal, and Generation Z thinks full stops are a ‘micro-aggression’, that can be a problem. On warm days when the streets are full of people in shorts and T-shirts, Britain’s arms and legs look like a mass Scrabble contest — a jumble of disconnected letters. ‘No Regerts’ is a common one. Plenty of sons pay tribute to their dear old mum, now she’s an ‘Angle in Heven’. And it’s shocking how many football fans support ‘Cheslea’ or ‘Asrenal’. How can they claim to love the club if they can’t even spell its name?.

When detectives in the Dublin police thriller The Vanishings pull in a thug called Mark Bulger (Brian Moore), he clenches his fists and rests them menacingly on the table. Blue ink across the knuckles spells out, ‘YOUR DEAD’. No point trying to explain to him about apostrophes or silent Es. But it would make more sense if he had ‘BRANE DEAD’ tattooed across his forehead. Bulger is prime suspect for the abduction and murder of young women over a 15-year killing spree, in this Irish drama set in the mid-1990s.

Originally titled The Vanishing Triangle when it was shown on Acorn TV in 2023, the five-part series began with a feature-length episode. It stars Downton’s Allen Leech as David Burkely, a policeman with a secret, who is sent into the rural suburbs to investigate the disappearance of teenager Amy Reynolds after a night out. Loosely based on the book Missing, Presumed by Alan Bailey, a true-crime account of how 15 women were kidnapped and killed, it’s part police procedural, part horror movie. We follow the minutiae of the investigation, with door-to-door inquiries, press conferences and long team briefings.

It stars Downton’s Allen Leech as David Burkely, a policeman who is sent to investigate the disappearance of teenager Amy Reynolds after a night out. The show is loosely based on the book Missing, Presumed by Alan Bailey, a true-crime account of how 15 women were kidnapped and killed. But there are also scares to make your heart lurch, as one suspect is tracked on a snowy night to a cabin in the woods, where he has a victim tied up and terrified. The scenes link together, but it can feel like you’re flicking between channels, watching The Bill one minute and The Blair Witch Project the next.

Ireland’s police, the Gardai, don’t come out of it well — half of them are lazy, drunken, incompetent bullies who make no effort to hide their opinion that young women out after dark are asking to be raped. But neither does the Press, who treat domestic violence as a part of everyday life and jeopardise the hunt for missing Amy by printing information obtained off-the-record. India Mullen plays journalist Lisa Wallace, traumatised by the murder of her mother by an intruder when she was ten years old. Now the killer is taunting her with cards and photos, though Detective Burkely is the only officer who appears to realise that this might prove a useful lead.