A Shot In The Dark

It starts as a factory break-in, the sort of job that should be over by lunchtime. Pearson and Lincoln get there, find the forced entry, and then find the raider still inside. He is armed, and before he makes his escape he fires a warning shot into the dark. Nobody is hurt. But the shot changes the shape of the case. Opportunists do not carry guns. A man who carries one has a history, and a reason to be somewhere. A factory at night is a big place to search, and the officers do it the way the job is taught, methodically, until the dark gives up what it is holding.

That history arrives in the person of Edward Letheridge, an insurance investigator with a name to offer. Robert Barr and Elwyn Jones's script, directed by Paul Ciappessoni, does something the show was always good at: it lets an outsider point the squad in a direction without handing them the answer. Peter Sallis is Letheridge, soft-spoken and certain, the kind of man who has spent a career reading claim forms and remembering who got out of prison recently. Watt listens, and Watt is rarely wrong to listen. The name Letheridge offers is a name, not a confession, and the episode respects the difference. Hawkins and Grant work the name; Lincoln and Pearson keep the factory end of it alive. Paul Angelis is Billet, Patricia Hodge is Chris Stroud, Christine Hargreaves plays Jean Marshall, and Valerie Murray is Miranda Jackson.

There is a cold, efficient quality to the episode, which suits the title. The shot is fired early and in the dark, and the rest of the hour is spent finding out what kind of man fires it. A warning shot is a strange mercy: the raider wanted out, not a body. The answer, when it comes, is the kind that makes a factory break-in look like the smallest part of the story.