A Man of Sorrows

"A Man of Sorrows" is the sixth series' darkest hour, and it does something the show had never done before: it puts Crozier, the Bureau's solid, pompous chief, at the centre of a murder. The episode opens on the image — Crozier fighting with a man in his home, the man dead, drugs and cash beside the body. Crozier, who called for an ambulance, is furious to see Bergerac and sends him away. Then he calls a man in London and tells him the courier never turned up, but the deal will still go ahead.

John Fletcher's script, directed by Geoffrey Sax, is a London story in the old mould. Crozier sends Bergerac to liaise with a detective sergeant, Alan Hallowes, in the Square Mile — a man who shows him the corruption at the heart of the City and is astonished that Bergerac is honest. Hallowes, played with a haunted, skeletal intensity by William Simons, is an addict: his payment for going to Jersey to buy drugs, for the syndicate that runs the trade, is heroin. He took the money and the drugs, became addicted, and now the last straw — the murder Crozier committed — has broken him. He dies of laced heroin in Bergerac's arms, having told him the truth: Chater, the London DCI, and Crozier are both in on it, and Hallowes was the bait.

The reveal is the episode's engine. Crozier, it emerges, spent two years setting the whole thing up with Chater — an officially logged operation to catch the syndicate, with the dead man in Crozier's house a courier he killed in self-defence, and every move they made logged. Bergerac, holding the dealers at gunpoint, watches the filming crew step out: it was a set-up all along. Chater is dismissive of Hallowes; Bergerac, who watched him die, will not be.

The episode is a bleak study in the cost of police work. Crozier did nothing wrong and everything terrible; Hallowes was used up and thrown away; and the credit for the arrest goes to the men who killed him. Geoffrey Sax directs with a cold, urban feel that suits the material, and the series shows its willingness to hold its own institutions at arm's length. A grim, serious hour that takes Bergerac out of Jersey and into a London that has no time for heroes.