Jumping the Lights

A vice squad celebration ends with P.C. Curles knocking down a young boy with his car. The boy dies. But what follows is a study in the casual arrogance of the badge: Curles, pursued by a traffic officer, gets away, changes back into uniform, and returns to the scene to help with the aftermath, as if he'd simply happened along. The car is unregistered. The only thing in it is a blank police memo pad.

Julian Jones wrote it, Robert Bierman directed, and Clark's team works through the layers: an old feud between the traffic police and the vice squad, an initial suspect who looks better than he is, and finally Curles himself, caught by his own fingerprints, all over the car because he was there helping. The killer's downfall is his own good citizenship. There's something almost funny about it, in the grim way this show does funny.

Shaun Dingwall, later a Doctor Who regular, plays Curles, and he gives the part a blank, unbothered quality that's more unsettling than a sweating villain would be. Clarke Peters, who'd find his most famous role in The Wire, is Mr. Banthorpe. Reggie Yates, years before Radio 1 and a household presenter's career, is Marcus Banthorpe, and Naomi Wirthner's Mrs. Banthorpe completes the family. Stephen Greif's Steven Ripley and Alexander Morton's Superintendent Tyrell keep the police end properly crowded. Meanwhile Connell's professional and private lives keep colliding, and Clark's fascination with Angela Berridge grows into something he can't manage.

The departmental rivalry is the real backdrop, a squabble between divisions with a dead child in the middle of it. That's the show's signature move: bureaucracy as the true crime, with the actual crime almost an afterthought. The feud between the traffic police and the vice squad is the kind of institutional grudge the show understands, petty and poisonous in equal measure. And the blank memo pad, the one object in an unregistered car, is the sort of detail that sticks with you long after the credits.