Paperwork

Detective Sergeant Bill Allen is beaten up on his own doorstep and left in a coma. Watt takes the inquiry, and the inquiry promptly runs into a wall that has nothing to do with evidence. Nobody likes Bill Allen. His colleagues find him hard to take, the villains he dealt with hated him, and at home his wife and son kept their distance. A detective with no friends is a detective with a long list of suspects. Even the inquiry into the attack starts to feel like a chore for everyone involved.

The case becomes a search for a motive when the victim himself turns out to be the problem. Victor Brooks plays Allen with the faintly sour quality the part needs, and Shelagh Fraser's Marjorie Allen does not pretend to grieve. Watt keeps turning over the man's life and finding one small, accumulating resentment after another, each one a possible reason for the beating, none of them quite enough. The episode's interest is not in who did it but in how many people would have liked to.

Around the case move the usual squad faces, Evans, Nesbitt and Dodds, and a supporting cast that includes Lesley Dunlop's Gloria Jessop, Davy Kaye's Sam Bloomfield and Catherine Brandon's Brenda Miles, each with a connection to the man in the coma.

Keith Dewhurst and Elwyn Jones wrote it, David Sullivan Proudfoot directed, and the episode takes its time, which suits the material. The comatose victim is the still centre of a case that keeps moving around him.

The title suggests the dull end of police work. But the episode is about something colder. A man nobody liked gets hurt, and the hardest part of the investigation is finding anyone who wishes it had not happened. It is a bleak little study, and the show does not soften it. The paperwork, in the end, is Allen himself.