Communications

Lincoln and Grant spend an evening watching a strip club, the dull kind of observation work that makes up most of real policing. Stakeouts are mostly boredom with a few seconds of trouble at either end, and this one delivers exactly that. Hours later, the stripper is found murdered in the park. Next to the body is a rag doll, and Lincoln recognises it. He saw that doll in the club. And it is the kind of detail that turns a park murder into a connected one, landing the case squarely in the squad's lap.

John Mackenzie directs, Elwyn Jones and Tony Parker wrote, and Communications earns its title in odd ways. Hawkins takes a bizarre telephone call about schizophrenia, the sort of call that makes a detective wonder whether the voice on the line is ill, clever, or both, and the episode is willing to leave that question open while the murder inquiry runs. The connection between the doll and the club pulls the two strands together. Peter Clough's Lincoln has the sharp eye; Norman Bowler's Hawkins sits with the strange call the way a detective sits with anything that does not fit; Peter Childs's Grant and John Flanagan's Pearson work the street. John Bindon is Edward Dinsdale, whose household, with Susan Richards as Mrs Dinsdale, carries some of the episode's unease. Kim McCarthy is Sharon Morris, the woman the club lost; Angela Savy is Mrs Williams, and Nicola Glickman is her daughter Mary. The names on the file matter here in a way they rarely do.

It is a sombre hour, more interested in the people around the crime than in the crime itself. A rag doll by a body in a park. A telephone call about a mind coming apart. The episode lets both sit where they fall, and trusts the viewer to feel the weight.