Solvent Solution

Inspector Kate Longton is trying to protect local children from a habit that keeps killing them, and one stubborn shopkeeper is trying to make it harder. Solvent Solution begins with a small injustice, an overzealous shop manager pressing charges against a respected elderly lady for a trivial shoplifting matter, and the police sensibly declining to pursue it. The grudge the manager carries from that decision turns out to be fatal.

When the police organise an anti-glue sniffing campaign, the disgruntled manager refuses to co-operate, and he allows a local youth to buy a substantial quantity of solvent. A few hours later, PC Danny Sparks finds the boy's body in a derelict house. The episode's final confrontation is the furious Longton in front of the manager, laying out exactly what his refusal to help has cost, and it lands with the weight the story has earned.

Wally K. Daly wrote it, Sarah Hellings directed. Anna Carteret is Kate Longton, with David Ellison as Sergeant Joseph Beck, Noel Collins as Sergeant George Parrish, Mark Botham as PC Danny Sparks and C.J. Allen as PC Brian Kelleher. Tom Georgeson plays John Holden, Tommy Robinson is Timmy DiMoro, Michael Hayes is Barry Bently, Beatrix Mackey is Patience Baker and Simon Rouse, years before he became The Bill's DI Jack Meadows, is Mark Johnson.

The episode is bleak and it should be. Glue sniffing was one of the quiet tragedies of the early eighties, and the show treats it with the seriousness it deserves, refusing to turn the dead boy into a statistic. The manager is not a monster, which makes him worse: an ordinary man whose petty grievance outweighed a child's life.

It is a hard hour, and a necessary one. Small disputes, the episode argues, can ripple outward into the deepest tragedy, and the police are left to sweep up the pieces.