Skipper's Walk

The allegation lands on Hawkins' desk, and it is the worst kind: that Det. Sgt. Stirling is having an affair with Jean Buxton, whose husband Tony is inside because Hawkins himself put him there. If it is true, Stirling has crossed a line no policeman should cross. If it is false, then someone is building a weapon out of gossip. Either way, this is not a job for a uniform and a warrant. The squad is a small world, and a rumour moves through it faster than a warrant.

So Hawkins and Watt do the sensible, human thing. They keep it quiet, and they look. Cyril Appleton's Peter Webb, Stephanie Bidmead's Jean Buxton, Frank Mills' Walter Dale and Anne Stallybrass' Mary Stirling, Stirling's wife, make up the small circle of suspicion, and the episode moves through it at walking pace, the way a discreet inquiry should. Knowles and Nesbitt run the small errands of the inquiry, and every conversation is measured twice before it is had.

Keith Dewhurst and Elwyn Jones wrote it, David Sullivan Proudfoot directed, and the show's willingness to turn its cameras on its own people is one of its best habits. For once there is no villain to catch. The question is what a force does when the accusation lands on one of its own, and how a man's private life pulls the whole squad into its mess. It is the sort of story that could easily have been a melodrama, and the script keeps it deliberately plain.

It aired in December 1973, in the quiet stretch before Christmas, and it is one of those episodes that stays in the mind because it is about people first and procedure second. Stirling's part in it is the hardest to play, and Warren Clarke plays it without asking for sympathy.