A matter of HONOUR...

KEELEY HAWES plays a detective determined to solve a horrific murder in this true story of a young woman killed by her family for daring to love the ‘wrong’ man

The 1980s-style icon that was DI Alex Drake in Ashes To Ashes; detective Lindsay Denton in Line Of Duty; Bodyguard’s Home Secretary Julia Montague: short of Met Commissioner, there’s hardly a posting in the battle for law and order that Keeley Hawes hasn’t filled in her brilliant acting career.

But now the star takes on a more serious role in the pursuit of justice, portraying the police-woman whose heroic investigation uncovered the truth about one of the most horrific murders this country has ever seen.

The victim was a 20-year-old woman, Banaz Mahmod. She was killed in Britain in 2006, yet the grim facts about the way she died are redolent of an almost unthinkably cruel distant past.

A Kurdish Iraqi refugee who had fled Saddam Hussein’s regime for the UK, Banaz was trapped inside an arranged marriage until she left her abusive husband. Then she made what turned out to be the fatal error of falling in love with another man. Her family members considered that Banaz had done nothing less than betray their honour. What happened next is almost beyond imagination: her father and uncle ordered that Banaz should be killed; the ‘sentence’ was carried out by three men – two of her cousins and a friend of theirs – who subjected her to hours of rape and torture before one of them strangled the life out of her.

In the smart, sober two-part dramatisation by Gwyneth Hughes (Five Days), Met DCI Caroline Goode – who was to be awarded the Queen’s Policing Medal for the investigation – first learns about Banaz as a missing person’s case. As she digs into the young woman’s life, a worrying picture quickly builds up.

It turns out that Banaz had been to the police on five occasions to voice her fears that she was about to be killed – yet nothing had been done.

For Goode, the challenge is two-fold: not only must she find a way through the closely guarded ranks of Banaz’s relatives, but also get her colleagues to ensure any other young woman is never left unheeded again. Hawes is utterly commanding at the heart of a drama that lifts the lid on horror just below the surface of modern Britain.

COMMANDING: Keeley Hawes, above, and right, with Umit Ulgen and Fisun Burgess