Coverup

Coverup begins with a mother's worry. Ken is renovating Orchard Cottage when a neighbour, Pam Strong, the widow of a fireman, asks hesitantly for his help. Her son John has dropped out of college, become sullen and silent, started locking himself in his room and may be stealing from her. She wonders if it is drugs. John has become friendly with Mark, another teenager, who rents a room at a nearby farm.

What the audience learns, and Pam does not, is that Mark and John stole a car and drove round terrifying the locals. The car hit a man and woman on a bridge, and Mark drove on, dumped it in a quarry and made John swear to say nothing. John later recognises the man as a local doctor, James Harlon, who found him a part-time job as a hospital porter.

Ken, who does not know the connection, visits Harlon and finds him an unlikely source of trouble. He then calls at Rooks Farm, where Mark and the landlord, William, deny knowing John, and where Ken spots syringes. Rocky follows John and sees Mark bullying him for money; John, it emerges, is stealing drugs for Mark from the hospital.

Rocky follows them to the bridge, and later he and Ken find fragments of glass and a key there. The key fits the front door of a cottage across the field, and its owner, Ann Fielding, has a large cut on her forehead. Ken has found the woman.

Laura, at the hospital, overhears John asking for details of a woman brought in after an accident, and learns that the only such woman was brought in by Dr Harlon, who insisted nothing be put on record. Posing as a records clerk, she calls on Mrs Harlon, who is mystified and confronts her husband. Harlon and Ann Fielding are having an affair.

Mark vandalises the cottage and drives off in Harry's Jaguar with John. Ken and Harry find John hiding in the car at the quarry, terrified of arrest. Ken reassures him and his mother that Ann is not badly hurt and that neither she nor Harlon is likely to want the publicity. He has reckoned without Ann. Angry at nearly being killed for a man who has deserted her for his wife, she calls the police, and Mark and John are arrested.

Jane Hollowood wrote the episode and Matthew Evans directs. Christopher Eccleston plays Mark, Lee Whitlock plays John, and Marjorie Yates plays Pam.

The strength is the construction. A single accident links a teenager's silence, a doctor's secret and a woman's anger, and Ken's investigation finds each link in turn. It also leaves the sympathy where it belongs: with a boy who did not drive and cannot bring himself to say so.

The weakness is Harry's subplot about visitors from Norway and a Linguaphone tape, which is light by comparison. Overall it is one of the darkest hours of the sixth series.