Trenchard's Last Case

The seventh series closes with a ghost from Bergerac's own past — a retired Scotland Yard chief superintendent who has come to Jersey on holiday and to settle a case that has haunted him for four years. "Trenchard's Last Case" finds the old detective, played with a magnificent, crumbling tenacity by John Barron, stalking Oliver Sutton, a wealthy island businessman. Trenchard believes Sutton staged the robbery of his own bullion company — a raid in which a young policeman, PC Harry Brennan, was dragged under a getaway car for half a mile and left paralysed from the neck down. He could never prove it. He has come to Jersey to make Sutton answer for it.

Brian Finch's script, directed by Mike Barnes, is a story about age, obsession and the things a career can leave unfinished. Trenchard's methods are barely legal — the fake accident that gets Sutton breathalysed, the bullets left in the holiday cottage, the photographer and journalist brought over to dig into Sutton's double life. The episode is as much about Bergerac's future as Trenchard's past: Crozier has been promoted to superintendent, the Bureau is losing its independence, and Bergerac, who has been thinking of resigning, sees in Trenchard a version of himself twenty years on — a man whose job was his life, who handed it to younger people and found nothing left.

The confrontation at the secluded fishing spot is the payoff. Sutton shoots Trenchard, who is wearing a flak jacket; Bergerac, who recommended the spot and has been waiting, shouts out and chases Sutton off. Trenchard survives, curiously unsatisfied — the proof he wanted, delivered by someone else, is not the same as winning it himself. Sutton is in custody. The old case is closed, and it changes nothing for the man who carried it.

The final scenes are the season's quiet farewell. Bergerac asks to buy Hungerford's boat with the money from selling his cottage, intending to take an unpaid sabbatical; Hungerford offers to lease it to him for a year and discuss it then. Susan meets him at the docks for a tearful farewell, and Bergerac sails from the island. It is a deliberate, melancholy pause — a detective stepping away from the job that defined him, in a series that was itself wondering how long it could go on. A fitting close to a season that had spent its year taking Bergerac apart, and a reminder that even the best detectives are allowed to wonder if it was worth it.