The Evil That Men Do

"The Evil That Men Do" is the final series' most cynical hour — a story about a dead woman, a stolen past and the respectable men who profit from it. Bergerac, now advertising as a private investigator, takes on two cases: a husband who wants proof of his wife's affair, and a terrified burglar who believes the police will fit him up for a murder he did not commit. The second case is the real one. Eddie Lyle, a small-time housebreaker, was paid by a man named Le Rozier to break into Lady Harriet Mallin's house and look for old papers. He found the safe open, empty — and Harriet dead. The official verdict is a burglar disturbed; Lyle knows it will be him, and he offers Bergerac £320 to find the real killer.

John Brown's script, directed by Tristan DeVere Cole, is a portrait of the evil that respectable men do. Harriet's husband Sir Robert was a hero of the resistance; her land is what everyone wants. The papers Le Rozier sought, it emerges, were for blackmail: Harriet's family had a wartime secret, and the men who want the land — the developer Gilchrist and his partner Le Rozier — have been using the past to take it. James Grout, in one of his few Bergerac appearances, plays Gilchrist with the smooth, plausible greed of a man who has never once doubted himself.

Bergerac works the case alone, against Deffand's suspicion and the Bureau's cold shoulder — the file on Lyle's record accessed without permission, the alibi demolished with a trick question, the parking tickets mounting. The resolution is grim: Lyle is cleared, the murderers are exposed, and the land deal collapses, but the dead woman is still dead, and the men who wanted her gone will find another way. The series does not pretend that justice restored anything.

The title, taken from the psalm, sets the tone: the evil that men do lives after them. Bergerac, in his new private life, is still the man who cannot let a wrong stand — but he is learning that the wrongs of the powerful are harder to reach. A grave, well-made hour, anchored by Grout's silken villainy, and one of the final series' strongest statements.