Watching the Detectives

D.S. Markham is caught on camera apparently taking a bribe, and for once the footage is the easy part. The hard part is what it means. Clark has to decide whether the tape shows a bent copper or a man being set up, and the episode is at its best when it refuses to let either reading settle.

Steve Trafford wrote it, Tom Clegg directed, and the title is one you may recognise from the Elvis Costello song, which is fair enough for a story about a force watching itself. Markham, played by James Gaddas, sits at the centre of it. Around him swirl the usual suspects: Kenneth Cranham, one of those actors who turns up in everything sooner or later, as D.C.I. Stubbs, and a young Andrew Tiernan as David Panter. More than a decade before he played Ephialtes in 300, Tiernan brings the same watchful presence to the part, and the supporting ranks stay busy too, with Rupert Holliday-Evans's D.S. Caplan and Geoffrey Whitehead's D.A.C. Flint filling out the corridors.

Meanwhile the Carswell affair keeps leaking into the present. Jenny Dean, Clark's lover and the WPC caught up in that case, is feeling the pressure, and the officers who had anything to do with it are all watching each other. Jerome Flynn's D.S. Eddie Hargreaves is on hand, along with the reliable machinery of Tom Georgeson's Naylor and Siobhan Redmond's Connell.

The episode is a study in suspicion, which makes it sound abstract, but it's anything but. Cameras lie, colleagues lie, and the truth about Markham only emerges through the fog of all of it. That's the show's home turf, and it works the ground well here. The strength of the episode is in the quiet moments, the pauses between accusations, when the tape sits on a table and everyone has to decide what it does and doesn't prove. And the Carswell thread keeps the season's machinery turning without stealing the focus.