Blind Alley

Mr Justice Ballantyre is about to move into Orchard Cottage in Bathurst, and the house is set on fire before he has spent three days in the area. The attack is not random. Left at the scene is a leaflet from the Free the Daventry Resisters, the squatters Ballantyre sentenced, and the message is plain: the law's reach has a memory, and so do the people it touched. The leaflet is a calling card, left where it will be found, and the police read it the way they would read any note from a group with a grudge.

Ralph Michael plays the judge with the right judicial composure, a man who has handed down sentences for a living and now finds his own name on a leaflet. Watt and Hawkins lead the response, with Evans, Cullen, Snow, Dodds, Perry, WPC Arthur and Lincoln filling out the operation, and the episode keeps the whole thing small and contained: a cottage in a quiet village, and the grudge that follows its new tenant inside. For the officers, the case is less about catching an arsonist than about understanding the sentence that set the fire.

Elwyn Jones wrote it, Gilchrist Calder directed. The setting does a lot of the work. Bathurst is a quiet place, the cottage is exactly the sort of retirement a judge would pick. But the fire is a violent interruption of a life that thought it was done with violence.

The show is good on the awkward truth at the centre of the story, that a judge's past follows him home, and that the people he sentenced see his comfort as part of the offence. It is a reminder that in this series the law is never just the law; it is people, with long memories. It is a cold little tale, told with the series' usual restraint, and the title, Blind Alley, fits a case where the answers keep leading back to the same place they started.