The Mystery of Pikey

There is a spate of burglaries in Middleton, and one of the houses is that of a paying customer of the restaurant. Crabbe's interest in the case is sharpened by the restaurant connection, and by a second matter running alongside it: Henderson's pike, which takes the episode into the food-supply side of the business and the class material the series works through it.

The town's pressure is the episode's real subject. The burglaries have produced a suspect the respectable citizens are happy to accept, and the pressure to convict comes from them rather than from any criminal. Crabbe's difficulty is that the convenient suspect is convenient for a reason, and the series treats the appetite for someone to blame as the thing that needs examining.

The suspect is Karl Elves, known as Pikey, and Ian McNeice is credited as Barry Wilkes, whose house is among those burgled. Crabbe believes Elves did not act alone and had help. Whether he participated in the burglaries at all is left open by the sources, which agree only that he is a suspect and that Crabbe thinks he had assistance, and this article preserves that ambiguity rather than resolving it. The nickname the episode uses throughout is a pejorative for a traveller in British usage, and no source consulted comments on the production's use of it.

The Wikipedia summary of the episode says that two posh children take advantage of a poor fisherman and that Henderson falls in the river, while the 1995 billing, TheTVDB, TV Guide, the DVD copy and the streaming synopses all describe the spate of burglaries, the Wilkes burglary and Karl Elves. The Wikipedia line appears to describe a secondary strand only, and the burglary version is the one every other source agrees on; both are recorded here and the burglary is followed as the main plot.

Neither Fisher nor Cambridge is credited in this episode's cast list, and Fisher is absent from the local IMDb record as well. It is one of only two Series 2 episodes on which neither appears.

Within the season the episode is notable for the largest share of screen time given to Henderson, and for the most sustained use of location filming away from the restaurant. Its argument, that a case in which the pressure comes from the respectable citizens is a good use of a detective who is an outsider in both his jobs, has not dated. It is also the most socially pointed of the season's episodes: the only one where the pressure to convict is the subject rather than the crime. The fishing subplot is a running gag with no bearing on the case, and the episode is not short of material but is short of suspense, which is its honest weakness.