Doggett's Coat and Badge

A group of police officers holds a celebratory lunch at Pie in the Sky for a retiring colleague. Among them is DCI Doggett, who notices one of the restaurant's regulars, Charles Rider, a quiet, wine-loving man who keeps his own cellar. Doggett's interest in Rider is not friendly, and the restaurant's problem is that a valued regular is being menaced at a table Crabbe is serving.

Rider is being threatened. He comes to Crabbe for help and Henry cannot get him to say what is actually happening. Henry's patience runs out and he threatens to open Rider's collection of wine one bottle at a time until he talks, and the threat works immediately. Charles Rider is not Charles Rider: he is Joseph James Webb, a former burglar who turned supergrass, put away his associates and has been living under a new identity in witness protection. His cellar includes stolen property, and among the bottles is one that a police officer once owned.

At the centre of the case is a bottle of Château Ausone 1814, said to be the last surviving bottle given by William IV to Sir Robert Peel at the founding of the Metropolitan Police. It came, suspiciously, into the hands of a legendary detective known as Striker of the Yard. Webb stole it, and his old associates, having tracked him down, want it back; the pressure on him comes from a gangland figure and from Doggett, whose interest in Webb is his own.

The bottle is a fake. It carries a modern printed label, where bottles of its supposed period had individually made labels. The real bottle was broken by Striker, who hid his error by substituting a bottle of Château Montrose 1934, not knowing it was one of the great wines of the twentieth century. Crabbe opens the substitute thinking it is an ordinary bottle, and the three men realise what has been poured away only after it is gone. Crabbe restores the position without exposing a dead officer's mistake and without his friend being harmed.

John Castle's Rider has to be a plausible restaurant regular, a frightened man and a retired criminal without the audience being sure which is true until the last act, and he carries all three. Maurice Denham's Striker is the episode's main piece of casting, a legend who turns out to have covered up a failure, and the performance makes the final revelation affectionate rather than cruel. Nicholas Ball's Doggett is a police antagonist inside the force rather than a criminal one. Griffiths' Crabbe is at his most physical here, and the threat to break up a collection of fine wine is the one time the series makes the food-and-drink knowledge an instrument of policing rather than a source of pleasure.

This is the most classical detective story of the six and the one the critical reception singles out. It has an object with a documented provenance, a hidden identity, a legend who proves to have feet of clay, and a twist that turns on period detail. The theme is reputation: Striker's fame rests on a cover-up, Webb's respectability rests on a changed name, and the bottle's value rests on a fake label. DVD Talk calls it the strongest episode of the series, and Mr E's review singles it out as the case where the restaurant and the investigation are one plot. The food detail is not decoration, because the solution is only reachable by someone who knows how a bottle of 1814 wine ought to be labelled.