Sisters in mum mystery

REALLY, honestly, when push comes to shove, how well do we really know the people we really think we know well? I mean, really? That’s the question being asked tonight – albeit a little less clumsily, thank the Lord – in a fine new three-night drama on ITV1.

MARYLAND (9pm) stars Suranne Jones and Eve Best as Becca and Roz, a pair of semiestranged sisters who find themselves thrown back together in challenging, indeed downright bewildering, circumstances.

Suranne is Becca, the sensitive one. Eve is Roz, the no-nonsense one (I do like the fact that their names seem to match their personalities), and what throws them back into one another’s orbit (is that the right expression? It looks weird now I’ve written it down) is the sudden death of their mother, found dead on a beach on the Isle of Man.

Obviously, this is a wretched situation in its own right. But that’s only part of the issue here.

Adding to the sisters’ distress (or, at least, Becca seems upset; Roz isn’t big on displays of emotion) is the confusion over how she came to be there.

I don’t mean how she came to be on the beach, I mean how she came to be on the Isle of Man.

As far as the sisters are concerned, their mum was in Wales. They have pictures to confirm it, sent just a few days ago.

But the coroner’s officer has news for them. “That’s not Wales,” he tells them, having glanced at the most recent photo on Becca’s phone. “That’s here. Peel.” (Peel is the name of an Isle of Man fishing port; he’s not telling her how to eat an orange.)

So, yes, all very weird, eh? Neither woman had the faintest idea their mum was there.

Roz seems prepared just to accept it and not dig any deeper, but Becca insists it’s weird and wants answers.

Can the coroner’s officer elaborate? He doesn’t strike me as the sort who’d go the extra mile to help, but no harm in her asking, right? “The coroner’s role,” he informs them, “is to establish how, what, when and where. Not why.” See, told you.

“Well, maybe you should stick ‘why’ on the list,” a frustrated Becca snaps back. Yeah, you tell him. Blooming jobsworth.

So it falls to the sisters to do the digging themselves, albeit in Roz’s case with minimal enthusiasm.

And it’s not long (just a couple of ad breaks later) before the mystery has intensified, as a picture emerges of a mother they barely knew, of a woman who’d been leading a secret life for years.

Can Becca and Roz put the pieces of this perplexing puzzle together?

And in attempting to do so, can they also fix their own deeply damaged relationship?

They’ve got until-Wednesday.