Unknown Soldiers

Frost is homeless, camped in a flat above an Indian restaurant, and his week goes from bad to worse: a young drug dealer holds him at gunpoint, and a Territorial soldier is killed by gunfire during a training exercise at the local army camp; Major Harvey, its commanding officer,, insists it was an accident and blocks Frost from the base entirely — a scandal would ruin his promotion. But when the Special Investigation Branch takes over, the bullet is identified as Russian-made, and a training accident becomes a murder case with Frost holding jurisdiction.

The victim, John Meredith was secretly involved with a fellow soldier, Neil Morrison — a dischargeable offence in the army of the time — and Morrison reveals that Sergeant Donovan regularly blackmailed homosexual soldiers. The trail leads to Corporal Devenish, caught with a Russian-made handgun; Devenish was peddling Russian arms to a dealer called Cavendish; Cavendish threatened him when he tried to withdraw, and it was Cavendish who killed Meredith, aiming for Devenish in the dark. The same gun was used by the dealer who held Frost at gunpoint. The threads tie together with the neatness of a procedural dream, and the episode earns it.

The second case is a robbery with a human face. A series of armed raids on Denton Security vans ends with the discovery that the drivers did it themselves: Les James, Barry Hockey and Dave Chaplin, ageing staff denied their redundancy pay when the company was sold, faked the robberies to cover their debts and support their families. Frost finds fish scales in the van — the men are avid fishermen — and catches them, understanding their motives well enough to regret the arrests.

Unknown Soldiers, written by Michael Russell and directed by Adrian Shergold, is an episode about men fighting old wars: the army's war on its own gay soldiers, the veterans robbed by their employer, and a detective who keeps fighting for them anyway. David Bradley, later of Game of Thrones, brings quiet weight to Les James, the best of the three thieves.

Unknown Soldiers is a quiet, angry hour about men failed by the institutions they served — and about a detective who refuses to let any of them be forgotten. A quiet, angry hour about soldiers failed by their own side.