Just A Whisper?

A quiet request, and an odd one. Mrs Elsa Rutherford wants PC Pearson to call on her in Axbury village, and when he does she tells him about the whispers. Voices at night, she says, in a place where nothing ever happens after dark. Pearson could have filed it under the kind of thing lonely people hear when they are frightened. Instead it intrigues him, and he goes looking. That is the whole engine of the episode: a good copper who decided a sound in the night was worth a walk.

Elwyn Jones wrote this one, Martyn Friend directed, and the script is patient with the small stuff. Pearson turns over the fragments, a word here, a name there, people who are up at hours when they should not be, and the pieces eventually arrange themselves into something larger and uglier than village whispers: a drug shipment, on its way. The fragments are the pleasure of the hour: nothing is conclusive on its own, and everything is suggestive once it sits next to the rest. Jane Baxter is a lovely piece of casting as Mrs Rutherford, the woman whose sleepless nights set the whole thing in motion. John Flanagan's Pearson carries the investigation with the right amount of stubbornness. Philippa Howell's WPC Arthur backs him up, Nicholas McArdle is PC Brown, and Michael Mundell's Alf Cook, Paul Ridley's Dodge and James Muir's police driver fill in the rest of the map.

What the episode does well is show how a case can grow from a rumour. No flash, no confession. Just a persistent sergeant, a pile of small details and the sense that somewhere a shipment is getting closer. The title keeps its question mark. And sometimes a whisper is just a whisper. This one turned out to be the whole case, waiting to be heard.