Homicide

Jack and Jenny Price come home to find the house ransacked and ten thousand pounds gone. That was a serious fortune in 1975, the kind of sum worth hiding carefully. The money was hidden in the Prices' own home, which makes the betrayal in the case more personal than any random break-in. The police arrive with notebooks out, and the investigation begins with the usual questions. But Jack Price is a businessman with a particular kind of certainty: only one other person, he reasons, could have known where the money was hidden in his own home. So he sets a trap, and when the intruder comes for the money a second time, Price shoots him. The intruder flees, and later dies, and the burglary victim finds himself at the centre of a homicide inquiry.

Edward Judd plays Price with the rigid logic of a man who believes he has done nothing wrong, and Patricia Mort's Jenny hovers at the edges of the nightmare. Walter Gotell's Chief Constable Cullen takes an interest from on high, and the squad, Watt, Hawkins, Dodds, Perry and WPC Arthur, has to decide what a victim's rights amount to when he has taken the law into his own hands. Roger Lloyd Pack, long before Only Fools and Horses gave him the name Trigger, plays Martin Webb, and Daphne Lawson's Micki completes the circle.

Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote it, Terry Williams directed. The title gives the game away: this is an episode about the word homicide, and about how a reasonable man's decision can look very different in a police report.

The show is at its best here, in the grey area between self-defence and execution. Price's trap was baited and sprung, and the shot was fatal. The questions the officers ask him are the questions the audience is asking too. It is a small, cold story, told without melodrama, and all the better for it.