In the Smoke

The Crabbes take a holiday in London, borrowing a flat owned by an ex-policeman friend, Nick Spencer, while he is in America on business. The holiday does not last. Margaret finds Nick's packed suitcase under the bed, which is odd if he is supposed to be abroad, and hears a message on the answer machine from his daughter, warning that her violent ex-convict boyfriend Danny is on his way to see him. Henry discovers Nick in hiding. Margaret discovers Danny's corpse in the dustbin.

Danny was killed in self-defence by Nick. The death is a self-defence killing: Nick Spencer, an ex-policeman, has killed a violent man who came to his flat and has concealed himself and the body out of fear of what the killing will mean for him. Henry's problem is not detection but loyalty, because he has to decide what to do about a friend who killed a man in self-defence and then hid. The production's synopsis states it plainly, that Henry's loyalty is put to the test, and the episode's interest is therefore not whodunit, since the audience and Henry know almost immediately, but whether a police officer protects a friend and on what terms. The sources establish the killing, the hiding and the test of loyalty but do not record what Crabbe does about it or how the matter ends, and this article does not supply a resolution the sources do not contain.

On the restaurant side, Gary and Sally are left in charge. The agency staff they hire turn out to be a quarrelsome married couple, and the kitchen is run by two people who are not speaking to each other. The pair's patience is tested, and the strand is the episode's comedy and is entirely separate from the London story except in so far as it shows what the restaurant looks like without Crabbe in it. The sources describe the strand no further than that, and it is the thinnest restaurant material in the series.

Denis Lawson's Nick Spencer is the guest performance the episode is built on, and the part is a specific one: an ex-policeman who has done what his former colleagues are supposed to do and is now hiding from the consequences. Maggie Steed's Margaret carries the discovery, the suitcase and the message and the body in the bin, and the episode uses her as the one who finds things out, which is the same role she took in the two-part racing story. The pairing of a husband who works out what to do with a wife who finds out what has been done is the episode's structure. Terence Conran appears as himself, which is the series' one piece of documentary-style casting and a nod to the food world the programme is set in.

The episode is the series' most direct treatment of loyalty versus duty, and there is no puzzle at all: a man has killed another man in self-defence and the question is whether a police officer who knows about it reports it. The episode's answer is not a legal one, and the ending is left with the friendship rather than the charge as the thing at stake. It is also the series at its furthest from its own format, since the restaurant appears only as the place the staff are left in charge of, and the two halves of the episode are the London story and a comedy of agency staff. It reads as the programme clearing the ground before its finale: with Fisher and the squad out of the way for one week, the last episode can bring everything back. Its title is the series' one piece of London slang used as a title, and it is the only episode in the run set outside Middleton.