2008 – a glorious May bank holiday weekend. A four year old boy goes missing after a neighbourhood barbecue. Believed to have been abducted, a nationwide search and media frenzy ensue, but the boy is never found. Present day – the wettest spring on record. Workmen digging up a burst water main uncover a body under the communal garden. Little Callum Reid – buried just yards from his own front door. The missing boy never left Arcadian Gardens. The Guilty is a dual-timeline drama about a crime. Moving back and forth between the days immediately before and after Callum Reid’s disappearance and the same bank holiday weekend five years later when his body is discovered, it explores the ways in which a single shocking incident fractures the lives of all those involved and how it feels to be forever defined by an event you wish had never happened. In 2008, Arcadian Gardens is a desirable address - a suburban oasis with comfortable detached homes overlooking a private shared garden. Unlike most anonymous urban streets, the residents pride themselves on their sense of community. Children play in the communal garden. People feed each other’s pets and water one another’s plants and, of course, every May Bank Holiday there’s the annual neighbourhood barbecue. Then little Callum Reid from No. 4 goes missing and nothing is ever the same again. Five years on, Arcadian Gardens is a very different place. An address synonymous with tragedy. The grief-stricken parents’ and their neighbours’ lives were torn apart by the events of that long May weekend and even after all this time the wounds are still raw. Then, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of his disappearance, Callum’s body is discovered, buried only yards from his own front door. And the nightmare begins all over again. DCI Maggie Brand leads the new investigation. Pregnant when Callum went missing, debilitating morning sickness had forced her to step down from the original case. Her son, Sam, was born only months after Callum disappeared. Now he’s starting school as Maggie finds herself in the uncomfortable position of reopening the investigation that destroyed her former boss’s career. Piecing together the events of that fateful weekend, we see Claire and Daniel Reid enjoying the company of their friends and neighbours, their boys playing happily amidst the noise and good-natured chaos. But hidden tensions lie just beneath the surface and, as copious amounts of alcohol are consumed, the mood of the evening changes, tempers flare and an ugly, violent scene escalates into a shattering revelation. The Reid boys are sent home early to spend the remainder of the evening with the family au-pair. Later, their parents sleep in separate beds following an argument. In the following months, the original investigation came under heavy criticism. The officers who responded to the initial emergency call failed to secure the area properly and, in those first few hours, evidence may well have been destroyed or contaminated. When a possible suspect committed suicide after harassment from the press, the senior investigating officer was forced to resign and with no real leads the case has effectively been on hold ever since – leaving the Reid family in limbo. Now Maggie must inform them that their son is dead. And what is more - there’s a good chance the killer is still living in their street.