Dead Reckoning

Dead Reckoning takes Kavanagh to a fishing port on the Yorkshire coast. A trawler has sunk off the North Yorkshire coast, and five people are dead. An inquiry has established that the boat was in disrepair. Kavanagh is on the team prosecuting the owner, Roy Lawrence, and one of the dead is Roy's son Paul. Kenneth Cranham plays Roy.

Wikipedia gives the charge as negligence, TVDB as five counts of manslaughter. Roy's defence is that a Royal Navy submarine surfaced near the trawler and capsized her. The claim, Wikipedia says, becomes more and more likely as the case goes on, and Kavanagh has to counter it.

The community is on Roy's side. He is popular in the bereaved town, and even Emma Taylor, Kavanagh's junior, feels sorry for him. Kavanagh believes that Roy has his own agenda and is not the philanthropist he seems. The barrister has to prosecute a man who is also a grieving father, in front of a town that sympathises with him.

Back in chambers, Kavanagh also averts a crisis by dissuading his clerk Tom from leaving.

Andy de la Tour wrote the film, and Charles Beeson directed. The cast includes Julian Fellowes as Clive Crebbin, Vincent Franklin as Alan Sheedy, Rebecca Front as Cathy Winslow, Colum Convey as Ben Roberts and Antony Carrick as Mr Justice Hildtich, with Nicholas Jones as Jeremy Aldermarten and Valerie Edmond as Emma.

Emma Taylor, played by Valerie Edmond, is the new junior of the fourth series, and she appears only in that series according to Wikipedia's cast list. The film was shown on Tuesday 21 April 1998, the sixth and last of the fourth series. Central Television made it for ITV. Two further films that were scripted for the series, Ceremony of Innocence and Seasons of Mist, were not shown with it; they were held back and broadcast the following year under the titles Time of Need and End Game.

IMDb voters give it 8.3 out of 10.

The Classic Film and TV Café reviewer says that Kavanagh can prosecute as well as defend, and this film is one of the series' prosecutions. Wikipedia names the characteristic shape of the series as a defendant who seems likely to be convicted until a twist occurs. Here the barrister is on the other side, and the twist is the submarine.

The sources read do not give the verdict, so the account stops with the case unresolved.