A Watch and Chain of Course

DS Maureen Connell goes undercover to look into missing property at a police station that turns out to be openly hostile to her, and the deception doesn't last long. Her cover gets blown, and from then on she's working without a net. It's the kind of job where "all the help she can get" is not a figure of speech.

The episode is doing more than one thing, though. Michael Carswell, played by John Benfield, wins his appeal against a murder conviction, and the question that follows is the one nobody wants to ask out loud: were corrupt officers responsible for putting him away in the first place? The Carswell affair becomes the season's running thread, and it keeps tugging at WPC Jenny Dean, who is closer to the case than is comfortable for anyone. Meanwhile D.A.C. Dunning, played by John Shrapnel, works the departmental angles, looking for a way out of the Met altogether.

J. C. Wilsher wrote it, Roy Battersby directed, Peter Norris produced. The guest list is a treat. Ray Winstone, well past his Scum days but still radiating the same short fuse, is Sgt. Godley. And a young Mark Lewis Jones, whose face you'll recognise from a hundred things since, is P.C. Terry Gilzean. The executive producer is Tony Garnett, the man behind Cathy Come Home and the 1978 corruption serial Law and Order, and this series carries the same wariness of institutions that close ranks.

What sticks is how much machinery the episode sets in motion. The Carswell case isn't wrapped up here; it's started. That's the point of a running thread, but it makes this instalment feel less like a complete story and more like the first pull on a thread that will take the rest of the season to unravel. The appeal is the kind of legal event that makes everyone in the building uneasy, because if Carswell was fitted up, someone still walking the corridors did the fitting.