A Policeman's Lot: Part 2: You Pays Your Money

The net closes on Jarman this week. The private investigator has been importing goods from Europe, and the link the squad needs comes from an unlikely quarter: the old lady who keeps the newsagent's and the adult shop, two trades you would not normally find under one roof. She provides the connection, and suddenly the case has a direction. The business district that looked so ordinary last week is starting to show its seams.

Watt decides to tackle Jarman himself, and that is where the trouble starts. Taking a case personally is a fine thing in a detective and a poor thing in a man who has to keep his judgement clean, and the consequences turn out to be more complicated than anyone ordered. There is a decent argument that Watt should have sent someone else, and the episode does not hide it. Frank Windsor plays Watt with his usual sense of a man carrying the whole job on his shoulders, while James Grout's Jarman tries to keep a veneer of respectability over dealings that will not survive much inspection. Watt is a man who believes in doing his own dirty work, which is precisely the problem. And the pair of them circle each other for most of the episode; the watching is the best part of it.

Norman Bowler's Det. Insp. Harry Hawkins and David Lloyd Meredith's Sgt. Bob Evans follow the threads, with Brian Hall's PC Drake and Heather Stoney's PW Det. Sgt. Green keeping the operation moving. Walter Gotell's Chief Constable Arthur Cullen watches from above, and Patricia Heneghan's Mrs Jarman gives the case its human cost. Elwyn Jones and Alan Plater wrote it, Peter Cregeen directed.

It is the middle of three parts, so nothing is resolved and everything is worse. You pays your money, as the title has it, and the price keeps going up. It is the sort of cliffhanger that works precisely because nothing explodes.