Roots of Evil

"Roots of Evil" is the eighth series' most patient hour — a story about a man who is being terrorised and will not tell the police why. Nigel Carter, a wealthy island resident, is woken in the early hours by a phone call that leaves him shaken. When two policemen arrive, they draw guns and shoot up his house; one plants a listening device; the other photographs his daughter. The terror is professional, precise and aimed at the one thing Carter cannot protect. And when Bergerac investigates, he finds a man who will not co-operate — because the men coming for him are from his past, and the past is a country he left behind.

Brian Finch's script, directed by Richard Spence, unfolds the history slowly. Carter arrived on Jersey seven years ago from Libya, with a British passport and millions of pounds. The men who are terrorising him work for Teddy Gallagher — a man Carter attended the funeral of — and they want him to do a job: pay half a million pounds for explosives, the way he used to, taking his twenty per cent. The flashbacks to Beirut, to Gallagher's funeral, to the interviews with the RUC and military intelligence that scared him off the game, give the episode its weight. Graham Crowden plays Carter with a wonderful, crumpled dignity — a man who built a new life and cannot understand why the old one will not let him go.

The attack on his daughter is the crux. Joanna, away at school, was kidnapped years ago from a resort and returned three days later as if nothing had happened — either a ransom was paid or Carter knew the people who arranged her release. The men now circling him know it too. The episode is at its best in the quiet scenes between Bergerac and Carter, where the detective's job is not to solve a crime but to persuade a frightened man that the police are on his side — and that the terror will not stop until he talks.

The resolution, when it comes, is earned. The listening devices, the stolen patrol car, the half-burnt uniforms left for the police to find — all of it is theatre, designed to make Carter feel the net is closing, and the script lets Bergerac see through the performance to the man behind it. A grim, character-led hour that shows the eighth series could do psychological pressure as well as plot, and a reminder that Bergerac's hardest cases were always the ones where the victim was too afraid to be helped.