Burnt

"Burnt" is the sixth series' most political hour — an insider-trading story that takes Bergerac off the island and into the murk of offshore finance. Sir Antony Villiers, a businessman with a Jersey mansion and resident status, is under investigation by the Department of Trade and Industry for insider trading. He has been buying failing companies, stripping their assets and playing the stock market with information bought through blackmail and bribery. The DTI, running a secret operation out of Jersey, wants to find his master company and take him down. Bergerac is the liaison; the surveillance is supposed to be discreet; and Hungerford, naturally, knows all about it — Villiers has been providing him and his associates with investment tips, and their money has disappeared with his.

John Fletcher's script, directed by Robert Tronson, is a patient, procedural hour that rewards attention. The investigation follows the paper trail: the computer spool Villiers destroys, the offices, the leaks to the press. The key, when it comes, is Sark — the tiny island with no business law, where companies register residents as directors and pay them to do what the owner says, so that neither the directors nor the owner can be prosecuted. T. P. McKenna plays Villiers with a silken, exhausted charm; the confrontation on a remote cliff walkway, where the two men question each other's motives and Villiers dangles Bergerac over the edge, is the series at its most philosophical.

The resolution is the episode's great twist, and it belongs to someone Bergerac has barely noticed. Anne Granger, a middle-aged pig farmer with a scarred face, was an engineer on the refinery Villiers bought and stripped — the fire that killed her friends and scarred her was his doing. She became a director in his company, learned everything, leaked the information to the press, and has been systematically moving his money where only she can reach it. The final scene has her burning it, on a cliff top, with a beacon fire to bring Villiers in — and Bergerac, after initial horror, joining in gleefully.

It is a fantasy of revenge, beautifully played, and the series earns it: the authorities, the DTI and the law all fail to touch Villiers, and the woman he scarred burns his fortune instead. A grave, satisfying hour about the people the system cannot reach — and the one who found another way.