Season 06 Episode 04

Three young American airmen, Stanley Obrero, Howie Bennet and Bobby Cooper, race a car at Tanner's quarry after drinking, breaking through a gate marked danger to life. A man in a yellow vehicle arrives, uniformed and sharply dressed, the airmen salute him, and Stanley is sick on the ground.

Geordie is on a quiet night shift with Larry Peters, Miss Scott and, in the cells, Tamara Gurney-Clifford, arrested for leaving a restaurant without paying and for stealing a napkin ring. The airmen are brought in for trespassing. Their officer introduces himself as Lieutenant Ellis, carries a cane, and says he injured himself running into a MiG in Korea. He is confident, and Geordie is deferential to him, to Will's surprise. Ellis is left in the cells overnight while arrangements are made to drive the men back to base. Stanley collapses and dies in the station. Pills are found on his body and lodged in his throat, and Will finds scratches on his arms and pressure marks and scratches on his neck that do not match the chain he is wearing. The chain bears the letters OW, or, as Will later works out, MO. The body was carried into the station, but Stanley was alive and well at the quarry, so the killing happened in the van.

A call to the airbase establishes that the real Lieutenant Ellis is in the sickbay with influenza, and the man in the cells has been impersonating an officer. He tries to escape through a bathroom window and is caught, and will not answer questions to a civilian, so Geordie asks him who killed Stanley. The commander is sent for. Colonel Wade arrives, wants the body removed and the case taken over, and Geordie refuses. The impostor is Colonel Wade's son. He admits he failed the pilot examination twice and that the uniform let him be the man he was supposed to be. He says Stanley had him over a barrel over everything the group had stolen and sold, and that Stanley ordered a man to drive a car against a ravine, knowing the heaviest car in the fleet would never make it. That man was Mikey, Stanley's brother, and he was killed. The impostor says Bobby and Howie killed Stanley in the back of the van and that he tried to stop them.

Will's notebook reading changes the case: the entries are not racing results but dates, and the words in the middle are in a form of Pig Latin, making the book a black market inventory of drugs. A chain of fuel theft, drug sale and intimidation runs through the group. During the night Will also reveals, in an argument, that he never did national service: his father arranged an exemption and he served in the school Cadet Corps, which was deemed to have discharged his obligation. Geordie, a prisoner of war in Burma, calls him a disgrace and says he used his schooling and his privilege to buy his way out of his duty, and Will agrees he should have gone, saying his father had plans for him that did not include two years of square bashing in Germany.

The deaths are untangled as follows. Stanley had beaten the other airmen and scarred them, and the marks on their arms are punishments for disobedience. In the van Stanley attacked the impostor, Bobby Cooper seized him by the throat to subdue him, and Stanley died. Bobby confesses and weeps, saying he did not want to hurt his friend. Howie Bennet, who had been the only man to score full marks on the Airman Qualification Exam and was working in a laundry, said nothing, because for him the uniform and the base were the way to a paid college education and a life. Bobby will be tried for manslaughter in a military court, and Orson Wade the Third, the impostor, is charged in an English court with Mikey's murder, because as a civilian he cannot be dealt with under military law. Geordie tells Colonel Wade so.

Alongside the case, Daniel Marlowe visits Leonard and finds him reading newspaper reports of other gross indecency prosecutions. Leonard says he wants to end the relationship and tells Daniel he does not know shame. Daniel answers with his own history: he was eight when he was first beaten for being a pansy, married a woman he grew to love, could not sustain the marriage, was found out through a letter, was blamed when his wife miscarried, and was cut off by his family, and he was not welcome at his mother's funeral. Leonard, who has recently told Daniel that he cannot bear never being able to hold hands in public, ends the episode by saying he realises Daniel stands to lose everything too. They are dancing in the vicarage when Will comes home, and Will also finds the stolen napkin ring in his jacket.

The episode is the strongest of Series 6, because the murder takes place in a police station overnight while the audience watches it unfold among the cells, and the impostor in the uniform is the most interesting figure the series had created in years. The Pig Latin notebook is the best single clue of the run, and Geordie telling Will what he thinks of a man who avoided national service is the harshest thing the two of them say to each other in the programme.