The Assassin

"The Assassin" is the final series' boldest hour — a story about a hired killer who wants to be stopped, and the detective he pays to do it. Bergerac is summoned to a lonely chateau in Brittany by Edward Hapgood, a retired city trader who has received a letter threatening his life: a photograph of a dead body and the caption, "Hapgood, we know who you are. By next Thursday, this'll be you." Hapgood wants protection, at 3,000 francs a day, and he wants the sender found. He is evasive about why he will not go to the police. Bergerac, as ever, is curious.

The truth is extraordinary. Hapgood was a hired assassin, working for an agency; the Americans hired him to kill a politician in Beirut who advocated Lebanese self-government, with a car bomb so the target would not look like one. He spent a week watching the street, the people, the ordinary life he was about to destroy — and could not do it. He resigned; the politician was shot by someone else; and now his replacement is coming for him, because a man who refuses to kill is a loose end. He hired Bergerac deliberately — not a military man but a detective — because he believes the assassin will use minimal force to get close enough to reason with, and Hapgood wants to talk him out of the life.

John Shrapnel plays Hapgood with a marvellous, haunted stillness — a man who has spent years thinking about the thing he refused to do, and has built an elaborate scheme to atone for it. The scrapbook of murders, the decommissioned weapons, the letter he sent himself — all of it is part of the design. The finale is a cat-and-mouse game in a darkened kitchen: the assassin rappelling through a hatch Hapgood left open, the disarmed gun, the moment where Hapgood returns the weapon to his would-be killer and lets him see the man behind the target. The assassin hesitates, then shoots — and Hapgood embraces him as the gun goes off, and the assassin is killed.

The next day, Hapgood burns the scrapbook. Bergerac notes the police do not need to know about his past; Hapgood reflects on having failed. The van comes for the body, and the episode ends with the old assassin's words ringing: no one knows who the next one will be. A bleak, strange, memorable hour — one of the most original things the series ever did, and a fitting penultimate case for a detective whose own story was nearly over.