Pardon

Red Raynor has done ten years for armed robbery, and on the day he gets out someone delivers a scythe to his front door. Ten years inside and the first thing the postman brings is a harvest tool. It is not a subtle message. Raynor is terrified, and the episode makes clear he has good reason to be, because somebody clearly wants him to know the past has not been filed away. Allan Surtees plays him as a man who has left prison and found the outside world just as frightening, and Jill Balcon's Stella hovers at his side like a woman who has been through it all before.

But the other strand is quieter and stranger. PC Snow comes across a deaf mute in the woods who believes he killed a policeman. The two threads do not mesh the way you expect, which is part of the pleasure. Neil McCarthy plays the man in the woods, listed in the credits as George Churchman, and Neil Seiler's Brown completes the circle of faces around the case. Rayner's terror and Churchman's confession make an odd pair of bookends.

The woods are used properly, which is rarer than it should be. Whatever is out there with Snow is not a man with a grievance but something harder to name, and the episode is content to leave it that way. The episode does not explain the man in the woods, and the lack of explanation is the right call.

Elwyn Jones and Tony Parker wrote it, Gilchrist Calder directed, and the episode keeps its feet in both the thriller and the village mystery without letting either short-change the other.

A scythe through the letterbox is a message with no punctuation required, and the episode knows how to sit with that unease. Raynor's fear is the engine, and the squad, Watt, Hawkins, Evans, Snow, Nesbitt and Dodds, mostly has to watch and wait while the old threats do their work.