Swan in His Pride

Fisher takes Crabbe to Bath. A member of the local murder squad has been killed, a woman police officer, and the death is being treated as the third in a series attributed to a serial killer. Fisher's interest is political: the killer is being used to explain deaths the local force has not solved, and an outside officer is wanted. Crabbe is reluctant and goes because Fisher makes him.

The dead officer is Lorraine Foster, who had been working undercover. She was posing as the girlfriend of the prime suspect in an earlier murder case and had become genuinely involved with him. She had also had several affairs, one of them with her own suspended Chief Superintendent. Her last assignment is therefore tangled with the local force's own conduct, and Crabbe's arrival is resented by the officers whose work he is checking.

The local detectives are defensive. Only Detective Constable Jan Connor offers him any assistance, and the episode's information arrives almost entirely through her. Crabbe works out that the serial-killer story does not account for what happened to Lorraine Foster and that a member of the local murder squad may be responsible for her death.

Lorraine Foster was not the third victim of a serial killer. The series of deaths attributed to the killer was being used by members of the local force to conceal their own errors and, in Foster's case, to conceal a killing of their own. Crabbe establishes that the local constabulary's account of the deaths is false and that one of their own is responsible for hers, which is why the local officers obstructed him throughout. No source consulted names the individual officer who killed her, and this article does not name one. Fisher's political purpose in sending him is served by the same finding.

In Middleton the restaurant is having its own crisis. While Crabbe is in Bath a burst pipe floods the kitchen, and the restaurant strand runs entirely without him: Steve, John, Nicola and Henderson have to cope, Margaret has to run the business and the damage, and Crabbe is absent and in the dark. The restaurant survives the flood, and the episode ends with Crabbe back in his own kitchen and the two strands united in the man rather than in the plot.

The episode belongs to Malcolm Sinclair and to Georgia Mitchell. Fisher is at his most instrumental, sending Crabbe into a hostile force to obtain a political result and offering him no protection once he is there, and the episode makes no apology for it. Mitchell's Connor is the one officer who breaks the local code and she carries the investigation. Crabbe, without Cambridge and without his kitchen, is more isolated than in any other Series 2 episode, and Griffiths plays the isolation as irritation rather than vulnerability.

The title is a food pun on swan, and the episode is a police-corruption story in which the food appears only in the restaurant strand. That separation is the point: for the first time in the season the two strands are geographically split, and the episode cuts between a police force rotting from the inside and a kitchen coping with a burst pipe. The theme is the use of a fiction to protect an institution, and attributing unsolved deaths to a serial killer is a way of not looking for the person who actually did them. DVD Talk used this episode as its example of the format failing, arguing that with Crabbe away the restaurant material becomes marking time, which is a fair charge on the episode's construction.