Higher Ground

Major Hansford has retired from the army and opened an exclusive preparatory school near Bristol with his wife Jean, and the school is under attack. Dead birds are left in Hansford's office and disrupt an interview with a prospective pupil and his parents. Jean telephones Eddie at Radio West. Hansford will not go to the police and will not discuss his past, which is the fact the whole episode turns on: the man who could end this at any moment chooses not to.

Eddie takes the case partly to get away from Satchley's latest publicity idea, a photo session in which he is to be dressed as a Chandler-style private eye. Posing as the parent of a prospective pupil, he visits the school on its open day with Erica and sees a second attack, maggots smeared over food in a marquee. He approaches the Major directly and is told to stay away. His first suspicion falls on Hansford's estranged son Rodney, who spent time in the same psychiatric institution as Eddie, and who denies involvement while saying plainly that he hates his father for the grief he caused his mother.

The attacks escalate. The inside of a Land Rover is torn apart, a sniper fires at Jean on the beach while she walks the dog, and then she is killed when a rope is hauled out of a river bed as she rides, pulling her from her horse. An old army contemporary tells Eddie that Hansford served in Northern Ireland; further enquiries establish a robbery south of the border involving Hansford and another soldier, in which Hansford got away with the money and the other man was caught and imprisoned. Eddie follows the Major to a deserted quarry, where Hansford meets his former accomplice, now released, and explains himself: he raided the bank because he was about to be paid out of the army in favour of a university entrant with a commission. He shoots the other man, turns on Eddie, then shoots himself and falls from a ledge into the pit.

Glyn Houston plays all of this without asking for sympathy, which is the right choice. Hansford is self-contained to the point of being unreadable, and the scenes between him and Eddie run on mutual contempt between a man who has spent his life inside an institution and one who collapsed inside another. Anna Cropper's Jean is the loss: a woman who tells Eddie she would have been a professional spinster had the Major not come along, who wants the marriage to work, and who is killed by a decision her husband made years earlier and would not explain.

The episode's lasting contribution is Fordingdale. Until now Eddie's breakdown has been mentioned in passing; here it has a building, a doctor and a consequence, since his reading of detective novels while detained is what led him into the job. What it does not do is give Eddie a proper correction: the wrong answer about the son is not worked through, so the move to Ireland arrives as new information rather than as a repair of his method. He is repeatedly wrong, told to stay out of it, and present only as a witness when the story ends. Bleaker than the series usually allows, it drew 20.9 million viewers.