Who Only Stand and Wait

A farmer digging on farmland finds the dismembered body of a young woman who went missing eighteen years earlier. She is identified as Claudette Thierry, a French woman, and because the victim was French a French police officer, Commissaire Marianne Dupont, is brought in to work with Crabbe on the reopened enquiry.

The case is a problem for Fisher as much as for anyone. Eighteen years before, Fisher had been an inspector, and he and Crabbe investigated the killing together. A labourer named Gary Bourne was convicted of the murder and confessed at the time. Reopening the case means asking whether the conviction was sound, which is a question about Fisher's work and about Crabbe's own.

Crabbe and Dupont come to doubt Bourne's guilt. Their reading of the case is that Bourne confessed to protect someone else, specifically a dead friend, and that the confession was accepted because a confession was what the investigation wanted. As the enquiry proceeds, the two build a working partnership across the language and the difference in jurisdiction.

The billing for the episode states its premise as a question, whether the wrong man was sent to jail, and the episode's outcome is that the conviction was unsafe. Crabbe and Dupont conclude that Bourne was covering for a dead friend and that the original investigation convicted the wrong man. The sources do not record whether the conviction is quashed, whether Bourne is released or whether anyone else is charged, and this article does not supply those findings. What the episode establishes is that the man imprisoned for the killing probably did not commit it.

The restaurant side is a gift rather than a problem. Dupont gives Crabbe a copy of Alexandre Dumas's Dictionary of Cuisine, which becomes one of the recurring objects of the series and belongs to the programme's habit of placing culinary history in the restaurant.

The episode is where the series confronts Fisher's past as a working detective, and Malcolm Sinclair plays the discomfort without letting the character become sympathetic, which keeps him consistent with the man who set the trap in the premiere. Crabbe's position is the most awkward of the first series: he was part of the same original investigation, so doubting Bourne's conviction means doubting his own work.

The episode's second half is largely a conversation between two police officers from different systems about a case neither of them can close, and the series is unusual among British crime dramas of the period in letting a foreign officer be competent without being a novelty.