This Other Eden

A spate of garden thefts hits Middleton. Whole gardens are being stripped while the owners are away: not ornaments or furniture, but the planting itself. ACC Fisher asks Crabbe to investigate and forces him to work with the National Horticultural Division, a specialist unit represented by two officers, DC Linney and DC Spink, who are clumsy and largely useless. Crabbe's first stake-out, with the two of them, is a disaster.

The only business apparently benefiting from the thefts is a landscaping firm called Gardens of Eden, run by Alan Wellbeloved. Its order book has grown since the robberies began, so Wellbeloved becomes the prime suspect. Returning home, Henry finds that Margaret has hired Gardens of Eden to redesign the restaurant's back garden as an al fresco dining area. The chief suspect is now working at Pie in the Sky, with access to the premises and to Crabbe's own household. Margaret's judgement is not careless — she has gone through the ordinary commercial route — but the collision is complete, and it gives Henry an inside track on the firm and its people.

The credited cast and the studio synopsis name the surprise directly: the identity of the real thief is unexpected, and the person benefiting from the thefts is not the person doing the stealing. The episode's structure, a suspect who is too conveniently the beneficiary, a firm hired by the victim's wife and a specialist police unit whose uselessness conceals the obvious, is built to point at Wellbeloved and then move away from him. The sources do not record the culprit's name, and this article does not supply one. What is established is that the real thief comes from within the garden-owning or employee circle, and that Crabbe's access to the firm through Margaret's commission is what closes the case.

The episode's comedy is Crabbe's two-day watch with Linney and Spink, played as an exercise in a fussy, exacting man being made to work with people who are not, and the failure of the stake-out is both the comic set piece and the plot's turning point. Maggie Steed's Margaret is again the one who acts commercially without consulting Henry, which is the pattern the series established in the opener and uses here at its clearest. Fisher's usual function, shifting the cost of his own problems onto Crabbe, is used to create the obstacle, since Crabbe gets the case because Fisher does not want the unit's failure on his own account.

The title is from Blake's Jerusalem and the episode's subject is gardens: who owns them, who plants them and who strips them. The food strand is replaced by an entirely green restaurant strand, which is an unusual variation on the kitchen problem, and the National Horticultural Division is the series' joke about police specialisation, a unit whose job is plants presented as absurd. This is the season's lightest episode in tone and its most conventional in structure, and it polls last of the six in fan voting. Underneath the farce the theme is trust within a marriage: Margaret's hire is a sensible decision and a bad one, and Henry has to work around his own household to do his job. DVD Talk noted that the division was a good comic invention the episode did not develop, and Mr E's review treats it as the season's demonstration that the series works best when the restaurant is the inside track.