White Ghost

White Ghost sends Fitz abroad, which is where the show most likes to put him when it wants to watch him work without the usual distractions. He is in Hong Kong on a lecture tour when the local police ask him to look into the murder of a Chinese businessman. The request arrives politely, the way these things do, and Fitz accepts it the way he accepts most things: with a cigarette and a complaint, plus an interest he pretends not to have.

The case pulls him into unfamiliar company. D.C.I. Janet Lee Cheung runs the investigation, Commander Gordon Ellison hovers around its edges, and the dead man's world surfaces in fragments through Freddie, Su Lin Tang, Peter Yang, Wei Wei and Al Tang. Paul Abbott wrote the script and Richard Standeven directed, and the Hong Kong setting gives the story a scope the Manchester stories rarely reach. The city is a character here, all neon and humidity, and Fitz has to read a culture as well as a crime. The investigation has the feel of a different show entirely: no familiar interview room, just a foreign city doing its business around a dead man.

Robbie Coltrane is the engine, as ever, and Michael Pennington's Ellison makes a decent foil for him. The supporting cast earns its keep too. Freda Foh Shen and Barnaby Kay do solid work, and it is a small pleasure to spot Benedict Wong as Peter Yang years before Doctor Strange came calling. It is the kind of casting that rewards rewatching, because half the names show up elsewhere in British television before long.

For a series special, it wears its looseness well. The mystery is not the sharpest Cracker ever put together. But the change of air suits Fitz, and watching him work without his usual home advantage is worth the trip. It also works as a way in for anyone meeting Fitz for the first time.