Cages

The episode's title tells you something odd is coming. Police make a bizarre discovery in the yard behind Szabo's fish and chip shop, and from that moment the neighbourhood stops being routine. What exactly has been found is best left to the episode; the point is that a quiet northern street suddenly has something in it worth the attention of Inspector Jean Darblay and her officers.

The inquiry spreads outward from the shop. Szabo the owner has to answer for the yard and everything that happens in it, and the people attached to the place, Duckworth, Donkin, Melisande Duffy, get drawn into the sifting of rumour and coincidence that follows. Even the local fixtures take on new significance: an Old Man who has seen everything, a Boy who has seen more than he lets on, a Youth in a club who would rather not be noticed at all. Small mysteries make the whole community part of the evidence.

Kenneth Clark wrote it, Jonathan Alwyn directed. Stephanie Turner is Jean Darblay, guiding the response alongside David Ellison's Sergeant Joseph Beck and Mark Drewry's PC Roland Bentley. Jon Rumney plays Szabo, Patrick Durkin is Donkin, David Ryall is Duckworth and Anita Carey is Melisande Duffy. Harry Markham, David Samuels and Paul Bigley fill the smaller corners as the Old Man, the Boy and the Youth.

The pleasure is in watching a strange little case pull ordinary lives into its orbit. Nothing here needs a forensic team in white suits; the work is done with patience, notebooks and the kind of local knowledge that comes from walking the same streets for years. The show was always good at that, at treating the peculiar corners of everyday life as if they mattered, because to the people living in them they do.

Cages is a reminder that a crime story does not need scale. A chip shop yard can hold as much mystery as the show cares to put in it.