Nothing to Declare

Customs and Excise sets up an observation on suspected drug dealers working the Thames, and then their man Fisher goes missing. Commander Huxtable asks Clark to find him, and from that moment the enquiry is less about a missing officer than about who trusts whom. Customs is convinced Thames Division is in league with the drugs squad and sabotaging the operation on purpose. And the river police think Customs is paranoid. Clark is the one standing in the middle, and it's not a comfortable place.

Michael Russell wrote it, Jenny Killick directed, one of the few women behind the camera in the whole run, and the episode opens with a piece of theatre that earns its place: Ch. Supt. Charlie McGregor, played by Nicky Henson, gives his retirement speech, all warmth and goodbyes, and is found beaten to death before the end of the hour. It's a brutal way to establish stakes, and Henson makes the loss land.

Underneath the inter-agency squabbling runs the usual freight: extortion, drug smuggling, illegal immigration, and the growing shadow over Jenny Dean, now under formal investigation for her part in the Carswell case. Keith Allen's Jim Ryman hovers on the edges, the kind of character who makes everyone else's motives harder to read. Des McAleer's Insp. George Anderson and Nigel Lindsay's Insp. Alan Grant put named faces on the squabbling departments, so the turf war never floats free of people.

What satisfies is the balance. One moment it's two departments bickering over procedure, the next it's genuine danger on the water, and Clark has to keep his footing in both. The bureaucracy is as much the point as the crime, and the episode handles the two without letting one swallow the other. The Thames setting helps: water, mist and warehouses give the case a texture the office scenes can't match. And McGregor's death, coming so soon after his goodbye, sets the tone for an hour in which nobody gets to retire cleanly.