The Policeman's Daughter

Assistant Chief Constable Fisher's younger daughter has left home after a row and joined a group of travellers camped on land at Henderson's market garden. She has dyed her hair magenta and taken the name Magenta, and Fisher wants her back. With his wife abroad, Fisher has no one else to send, and he gives the job to Crabbe.

The case arrives at the same moment as a second problem. Henderson has just bought the field to add to his market garden and finds it occupied by the travellers, who are not moving. He appeals to Crabbe as his supplier and his friend. Working from both ends, Crabbe finds that the two complaints are the same situation seen from two sides: the squat is on Henderson's new field, so the girl Fisher wants brought home and the trespass Henderson wants removed are one problem, and neither of the men asking for help can be satisfied without the other being satisfied first.

Crabbe negotiates rather than enforces. He brokers a deal that moves the travellers on, and in doing so he has to get Fisher to understand that the way to get his daughter back is not to have her brought back. The reconciliation between Fisher and Jane is the point of the episode rather than the removal of the camp. The travellers move on under an arrangement Crabbe constructs, Henderson gets his field back, and Fisher and his daughter are reconciled because Fisher is made to approach her as a father rather than as an Assistant Chief Constable.

There is no crime. The episode is closer to comedy of manners than to detective fiction, and it is named after a relationship rather than a dish, which makes it the only instalment in the series with a non-food title. Its argument is that a policing solution to a parental problem cannot work, which is the same argument the programme makes about policing in general, applied domestically to the man who applies it professionally.

This is the season's Fisher episode and the most substantial character work Malcolm Sinclair gets in the run. Fisher has been established as a careerist who uses Crabbe; here he is a father whose daughter has rejected everything he is, and Crabbe has to manage him as carefully as the squatters. Sinclair plays the humiliation accurately: Fisher does not become warm, he becomes practical, which for him is the same thing.

Natalie Morse plays Jane as a young woman serious about the life she has chosen rather than simply being difficult, and Nick Raggett's Henderson gets a real stake for once, with the field standing for his money and his living. DVD Talk's reviewer later named this episode as evidence that the series could be preachy, which is a fair description of its closing scenes and is recorded as one reviewer's view.