Lies and Damned Lies

An old man claims he saw a prostitute attacked by CID officers, and DSU Tony Clark is the one who has to follow it up. The allegation is serious, the witnesses are thin, and an influential detective is working hard to make sure the enquiry goes nowhere. The case eventually cracks from an unusual quarter, which is just as well, because by then the only eyewitness is dead and the room for error has shrunk to almost nothing.

Michael Russell wrote it, Roy Battersby directed, and together they give the episode a grim, patient tone. The deeper story is the one the show keeps circling: nobody grasses on anybody. A sergeant helps cover up a senior officer's mistakes, the senior man being Master of his Masonic Lodge, and the price of loyalty is steep. The sergeant is ostracised, threatened with the oath, and ends up taking his own life. It's the kind of outcome that makes the "one bad apple" defence look like wishful thinking.

The casting is a roll-call of faces you'll spend the next decade spotting elsewhere. David Bradley, later Argus Filch in the Harry Potter films, is Sgt. Harry Ross. Jim Carter, years from Downton Abbey's Mr Carson, plays D.I. Dick Corbett. And Neil Dudgeon, long before he inherited Midsomer Murders, turns up as D.S. Alan Hanson. Around them, Neil Pearson's Clark, Tom Georgeson's Naylor and Siobhan Redmond's Connell hold the centre together.

It's a heavy episode, and it earns its weight. The brutality allegation is investigated, but the rot it uncovers runs deeper than any visible bruise, and the show isn't shy about saying so. The Masonic detail is the sort of specific the show is good at: it's not just corruption, it's corruption with a handshake and a ritual attached, which makes it feel both older and more ordinary than a conspiracy.