A Quiet Man

Emrys James plays Jack Hodder, a businessman who survives a bomb attack on his own home. For anyone else, that would be a stroke of luck. Watt and Hawkins read it differently. Hodder has refused treatment and gone quiet, and the two of them are convinced that what he is planning is revenge.

The odd thing about "A Quiet Man" is how little the police have to go on. Hodder is alive and saying nothing, so the team does the only thing it can: it watches, and it waits for him to make the first move. PC Nesbitt and Det. Sgt. Evans carry the legwork, tracking Hodder's movements, while the rest of the squad listens to the neighbourhood. Suspicion settles on the men around him, the business associates and the people who know his routines, and the episode finds its tension in ordinary details, a street where every face has become a question. The pressure of the hour comes from not knowing which way Hodder will move, and Emrys James keeps that uncertainty alive by doing very little at all.

Robert Barr and Elwyn Jones wrote it, Kenneth Ives directed, and the supporting cast is a roll call of familiar faces: Laurence Harrington as George Latimer, Alun Armstrong as David Miller, Rio Fanning as Kenny, Norman Ettlinger as Watson, and James Walsh as the milkman. But there is something quietly chilling about that last credit. A man at the door every morning, and he might have seen everything. It is the small detail the script hands him, and the episode is full of such details.

Bombs in a suburban street, a victim who will not say why. It is a small story, tightly told, and it reminds you how easily an ordinary life can be broken into. That, more than the investigation itself, is what stays with you.