A Person Unknown

Kingley Woods gives up a body, and the body has been there a long time. The man is decomposed, perhaps two years in the ground, and he has been stabbed and shot, which is the kind of thoroughness that makes a pathologist raise an eyebrow. A body that has lain that long does not get up and complain, so the evidence has to do all the talking. But then the ballistics come back and the case turns strange: the gun used on this man is the same weapon used by Alec Kenny, and Kenny has been in jail for over two years.

The episode is a slow, patient untangling. Michael Sheard's Doctor Janes supplies the medical detail, and the task force, Watt and Hawkins to the fore with Evans, Dodds and Perry behind them, works through the record of a dead man nobody has missed. Myrtle Devenish's Mrs Allan and Brian Croucher's Bernie Lawson give the inquiry human faces, and Ben Howard plays Alec Kenny himself, the man who holds the key whether he knows it or not. Leslie Schofield's Det. Con. Thomson does the legwork.

Robert Barr and Elwyn Jones wrote it, Vere Lorrimer directed. The structure is an old favourite of the series: a crime left to cool, then reopened, with the calendar working against everyone's memory.

The pleasure is in the logic. The dates are the puzzle: a body that old, a suspect who has been locked up the whole time. The gun has to fit both, and the answer, when it comes, respects the calendar. There is no hurry in the telling, and the episode trusts the audience to hold the dates in their heads while the officers do the arithmetic out loud. It is a quiet, diligent hour of police work, with a proper edge supplied by Brian Croucher, a few years before Blake's 7 gave him a more famous uniform, and by Michael Sheard, who was on his way to a hundred familiar faces.