So begins Five Days (BBC1, tonight, 9pm), a five-part crime thriller which continues over the following two nights and concludes next week.
It tracks five 24-hour periods after the abduction of a wife and mother called Leanne, played by Christine Tremarco. The mystery starts on a hot summer day when she sets off to take her two young children to visit her grandfather.
Leanne stops to buy flowers in a lay-by but then disappears, leaving her two small children waiting for her in the car - lost and miles from home. They walk off to find their mother, only to go missing themselves.
Before long, the family's disappearance turns into a complex police investigation and also a major news story, with the TV drama unfolding on days one, three, 28, 33 and 79.
It becomes clear that no-one is quite as they seem, including Leanne's second husband Matthew (David Oyelowo), who finds himself under suspicion, Det Supt Barclay (Hugh Bonneville), the man leading the hunt, or Sarah Wheeler (Sarah Smart), a stranger who finds Leanne's son hiding in her bin sheds.
A co-production with America's HBO, the drama also features veteran star Edward Woodward, best known for sixties spy thriller Callan and eighties American hit The Equalizer.
Leanne's husband Matt is just an ordinary man, holding down a job in the local gym, when his whole world falls apart.
"One of the interesting things about playing this part has been the fact that you just don't know how you're going to react to this situation," explains ex-Spooks actor David.
Loved ones
"We have all experienced the death of loved ones, or know people who have, and very often people will say they laughed or they didn't cry for two years and then had a breakdown, or they cried there and then - there is no set way that we, as human beings, deal with grief.
"Matt's whole life is decimated by Leanne and the two children going missing and through the five episiodes we see an ordinary man dealing with the pressures of not just the press plaguing him, because it's a high profile story, but also the police.
"In our age of celebrity, I suppose you see a lot of people who actually embrace and gravitate towards the public eye, but this is definitely a man who doesn't want that."
Suspicion about Matt is fuelled by the friendship he develops with stranger Sarah, the recruitment consultant who finds his son. Former At Home With The Braithwaites' Jane Hall and Blackpool star, Sarah Smart says of her namesake: "She's very much a loner, but she has a dark secret which makes her very interesting.
"She's quite guarded because of this secret, so it does take a while for people to get to know her. Everyone is very suspicious of her but viewers will soon realise why she is the way she is and, later in the series, they will discover her secret.
"They use each other, basically. He is attractive and there is a chemistry between them and it's a complex one because it's about needing something that you can't have. It's not a love story."
Bonneville, last seen officiating at the Vicar of Dibley's wedding, is the senior detective under pressure to find Leanne - dead or alive.
"It's almost Dickensian in the complexities of the relationships and the way the characters overlap and the stories interweave," he says. "There are often huge time jumps between episodes. Sometimes, it's a couple of days and, sometimes, it's weeks, so you have to keep up with it. No-one is going to be spoon-fed.
"This drama is quite bold and honest about the painstaking way in which the police are obliged to work, and should work.
"It is very slow and deliberate. Barclay is a man who will only rely on evidence rather than pure hunches.
"I think the HBO American audience will love it - it'll go down really well over there because the story is universal. It's really about the ripple effect of one potentially tiny incident which turns into a massive incident. Five Days shows the way it impacts on so many people."
For all the latest news from the world of television, check out Ian Wylie's blog, The Life of Wylie .
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