Betrayals

A soldier home on leave from Northern Ireland gets tangled up in a serious incident, and Hartley has to deal with the consequences. Betrayals opens the third season on familiar ground: the ordinary life of a serviceman colliding with the machinery of an investigation, and the question of where duty ends and blame begins.

The Read family stands at the centre of it. Billy Read is the soldier, home and looking forward to leave, and the incident that swallows him up pulls his family in with him: Albert, Anne and Mrs. Read each have their part in the story, and the inquiry has to pick its way through the loyalties of the household. Inspector Jean Darblay leads the response with Sergeant Joseph Beck and Sergeant George Parrish beside her, and the arrival of Inspector Harry Buxton and PC Peter Sims widens the net. Frank Tompkinson supplies the community's version of events, and the episode keeps its attention on what the incident has done to the family caught in it.

Nick McCarty wrote it, Robert Tronson directed. Stephanie Turner is Jean Darblay, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish, Edward Kelsey as Inspector Harry Buxton and David Gillies as PC Peter Sims. Frank Mills plays Albert Read, Philip Martin Brown is Billy Read, Jayne Lester is Anne Read, Jean Rimmer is Mrs. Read and Peter Welch is Frank Tompkinson.

The title promises the theme: soldiers and police both know what it is to be betrayed by the situation you trusted. The episode handles the institutional conflict against personal circumstance with the series' usual care, refusing to make the soldier either a hero or a villain.

It is a strong way to begin the season. Even home on leave, the threads of duty and consequence stay wound tight around the people in the story, and the show does not pretend otherwise.