Alarums And Excursions

Hawkins has a gardener, a jobbing man called Stanton, and one day Stanton is not where he should be. It is the kind of absence most people would not notice for a week, but Pearson has the sense to take it seriously. He walks Hawkins to Stanton's caravan, near Ashford, and inside it looks as though a violent fight has taken place. Whatever happened to Stanton happened in that small space, and the caravan sits out of the way, which is probably why nobody found the signs sooner.

Elwyn Jones wrote this, Kenneth Ives directed, and the episode builds its mystery around a man with no history. That is the trick of it. The police have a caravan, a struggle and a vanished gardener, and nothing else. There is no record of trouble and no enemies, and nobody can think of a reason anyone would hurt him. The puzzle is the man: a jobbing gardener, the kind of person the system usually forgets until something happens to him. A gardener without a history is a puzzle before it is a case. The investigation has to start from scratch, which means knocking on doors in a community that would rather not answer them, and the doors close as often as they open. Robert Stephens is Colonel Rawlings, Nyree Dawn Porter is his wife Jane, Nigel Stock is Dr Tadman, Paul Hardwick is Mr Denton, and Christopher Benjamin plays a civil servant who, inevitably, has papers to be careful with.

The title, borrowed from Shakespeare's stage directions, promises noise and bustle; the episode is quieter than that. It is a sturdy procedural about an ordinary man and the mystery of why anyone would bother with him. The absence of a motive is the whole case. By the end you read the title differently. For Stanton, the alarums were real enough, and the excursions were the ones nobody saw.