Manoeuvre 11

A demonstration against public spending cuts turns into a riot, mounted police are called in to disperse the crowd, and a young girl is hurt. She dies later. The question Clark has to answer is the one every police force dreads: who authorised it? Chief Supt. Tattersall, played by Kenneth Colley, accepts responsibility, and there's a version of that which ends the matter. But the episode keeps prodding at the chain of command above him, and the suspicion grows that Tattersall is covering for failures higher up.

Ron Rose wrote it, Roy Battersby directed, and the deck is stacked against the enquiry from the start. The chief constable himself is heading the official investigation, which means Clark's team is working the case with one hand tied behind its back. Bernard Hill, who'd later captain the Titanic and ride to Helm's Deep, is that Chief Constable Harmsworth, and he brings the right weight of authority. James Cosmo's D.C.C. Birman, Dearbhla Molloy's A.C.C. Jan Lewis and Ralph Brown's D.A.C. John Convey complete a guest cast that makes the top of the tree feel properly crowded and properly closed.

The series has done industrial conflict before, but this is its most direct confrontation with police accountability. Nobody here is a villain in the usual sense; they're all men and women defending a version of events, and the girl's death gets lost in the defence. Clark ends the episode no closer to a clean answer, which is the honest outcome. Some enquiries exist to be smothered, and the show says so plainly. The demonstration scenes have a documentary feel, crowds and horses and the noise of a day going wrong, and the girl's death is handled with a restraint that makes it worse. The episode knows that the tragedy isn't the moment of violence, it's the meeting rooms afterwards.