White Lies

Commander Morrison has a case he wants help with, and Bulman is the help. The arrangement suits both men: Morrison gets a pair of eyes that owe him nothing, and Bulman gets to do police work without carrying the rank. Neither man has to pretend to be anything he is not, which is a rare luxury in a genre full of disguises. The episode is a straightforward collaboration between the private world and the official one, and the hour settles into it nicely.

Murray Smith wrote it, Gareth Morgan directed. But the cast list is a quiet one, Don Henderson and Siobhan Redmond carrying the episode between them, and that suits the material. White Lies is a title that points at the small deceits people tell to keep the peace, and Bulman, of all people, knows how those end. He has spent his working life in the space between what people say and what they mean.

Bulman has always been good at the gentler side of interrogation, the version where people tell him things because he does not push. Henderson plays that quality without making a show of it, which is the point of the character. Lucy McGinty works alongside him as the second set of ears, and Redmond gives her the competence the partnership needs. The case is not a complicated one, but the people in it are, and neither actor needs a big scene to be worth watching.

The hour is minor in scale and proud of it. Some cases are about broken families and broken lives, and some are about the small lies that smooth things over until they stop working. This one is the second kind, and it is handled with the show's usual warmth. It is the sort of hour that rewards the patient viewer.

A quiet hour, and none the worse for it.