Slip Of The Tongue

Two professionals break into a canning factory and take a petty thief along for the ride. All three are arrested. The professionals go inside, and Terry Johnson walks out with probation. Nobody else thinks twice about it. Hawkins does. Probation, for a man caught in a factory at night with two professionals, is not the usual outcome. The factory is the last place you would expect trouble, which is why the show puts it there.

That disparity is the whole episode, and it is a good one. A man with Johnson's record does not usually walk away with probation, and Hawkins wants to know why. The suspicion, as he follows it, is that the break-in was never quite what it looked like, and that someone arranged Johnson's soft landing. Joseph Blatchley plays Johnson as a small, anxious man who knows he has been given something and is not sure what it costs. The episode trusts its audience to keep up, and it is better for the trust. Blatchley, a stage actor of real range, makes Johnson's gratitude look like a form of fear.

Elwyn Jones and Tony Parker wrote it, Gilchrist Calder directed. Gabrielle Lloyd's Carol Smith, Elizabeth Power's Jane Maxwell, Oliver Smith's Neil Fisher, Alan Ford's Tommy Buckley and Barry Linehan's Jack Barker give the investigation a full, lived-in world to move through, and Evans and Nesbitt do the legwork while Hawkins follows the thought.

The title tells you where to look. Somewhere in all that talk, somebody said too much, and Hawkins is the man with his ear to the ground. It is the quiet episodes like this one that remind you why the series is worth watching. It lives in the moment when a small detail refuses to sit still. Nesbitt's flat-footed scepticism is the perfect foil for Hawkins' coiled suspicion.