Listen to Me

Harry Shepherd is serving a sentence for killing a shop assistant during the robbery of a jeweller's shop, and he has arranged for a telephone to be smuggled into the prison. Before he is caught with it he gets a call through to Radio West asking Eddie to prove his innocence. When Eddie visits, he finds Harry less concerned about proving anything than about the Private Ear keeping an eye on his wife on the outside. Mel Shepherd then climbs onto the roof of the Radio West building and threatens to jump unless Eddie establishes that her husband was wrongly convicted. He talks her down and takes the case on her terms, which is the only terms offered.

The trail runs through a corrupted investigation. The jeweller, Mr Landsman, says the killer wore a mask and that the policeman who made the arrest insisted on a description that fitted Harry Shepherd. That officer, Inspector Colston, has since been suspended for corruption, and he gives Eddie the other chief suspect, Stan Burnham. Burnham says he did not rob the shop and that after the killing the criminal underworld tried to find the real murderer, having broadly accepted that Shepherd was framed. A fence confirms that no jewels from the robbery were ever offered to him. Eddie traces the man who supplies firearms to the local underworld, gets a description of whoever bought the shotgun, and goes back to the shop to ask about the dead assistant. The Landsmans remember her drawing a moustache on a newspaper photograph of a man. Her boyfriend works at the newspaper; Eddie finds the edition, adds a moustache to the picture himself, and the face becomes that of a man employed at the paper.

The man's flat yields a drawer of pornography and a scrapbook of cuttings about sex offences, and he attacks Eddie when he returns. He is the photographer who took Eddie's picture outside Radio West at the start of the case. He had assaulted the shop assistant and then shot her during a staged robbery to cover it, because she was about to identify him.

The roof is the making of the episode. It gives Eddie a deadline and a hostage in the same shot, and it puts the station's own building at the centre of a case rather than at its edges. Sandy Ratcliff plays Mel as a woman running a campaign rather than grieving, and the suggestion in that scene is that Eddie calms her by recognising what she is doing, which is the first time his own instability is used as a qualification rather than a disability. Where it strains is the solution: Eddie identifies a killer within hours of a case the police closed a year earlier, working from a description of a shotgun buyer and an annotated photograph. It is a real implausibility. The episode is also the only Series 1 story in which the crime was solved wrongly by a corrupt officer rather than not solved at all, and the mechanism, a single officer's insistence on a description rather than fabricated evidence, is exactly the failure mode later miscarriage inquiries described. The audience fell to 15.8 million, because ITV returned on 24 October and this was the first episode to face competition.