The Flowers of Edinburgh

The episode begins with an arrest that opens a larger case. Bulman and Willis stop a man, Johnny Maguire, carrying what they take to be a blue film. The film turns out to be footage of Scotland. That misreading is the door into the story: material the officers assumed to be pornography is political, and the case is not what the squad went into it expecting. Gabriel Byrne plays Maguire in a small pre-fame guest part.

A second thread is already running in Edinburgh. Det. Cons. Vanessa Bennett is in the city on holiday and has become involved with Ludo Leishman, a young man of position. Her time off is not leisure for long, because she finds her contact, Angela Walker, dead in a park. The informant she was dealing with has been killed and the death turns her holiday into an investigation she is personally implicated in. When the squad learns of Maguire's death, Bulman and Willis travel to Edinburgh and the episode becomes a joint investigation run across two police forces, with DI Bruce, DI Jenkins and DS Wetherspoon on the local side.

The case is a blackmail operation with a political purpose. The organisation the squad uncovers takes money from people with secrets and uses the leverage for political ends rather than simple profit, and the documentary footage Maguire was carrying is part of what makes the operation worth killing for. The blackmail ring is bound up with Scottish separatism, the reference account naming a militant nationalist group among the organisations the suspects are connected to. Behind the operation sit people of standing, and Dugdale's presence places the case in the intelligence frame rather than treating it as a local crime. The episode's treatment of the political strand is neither a defence of it nor a crusade against it: the nationalists are part of the criminal network the squad has to work through, and the respectable figures are as implicated as the militants.

Fulton Mackay's character, Morton, provides the resolution's human centre, described as a spurned lover and the secret father of one of the innocent people murdered after being caught up in the plot. That is the episode's mechanism for making the political blackmail matter, because the people it destroys are not abstractions and the man who has to reckon with the loss is a father who had kept his connection to his child hidden. Mackay, at the height of his television fame from Porridge, plays a private grief that becomes the case's real cost, and the guest cast is the strongest of the season, with Geoffrey Keen as Sir Dalrymple Walker and Andrew Burt as Leishman.

Fiona Mollison is the episode's principal beneficiary. Bennett had generally been used as the squad's capable junior, present without being the subject, and here she is on holiday, in a relationship, and the first officer at the scene of her own informant's death. That sequence, a professional relationship becoming a personal investigation, is the closest the series comes to examining her private life, and the relationship is written as something she chose and something that turns out to be implicated in the crime, which is a harder position than a simple betrayal. The standing of the squad is unchanged but her judgement is made part of the story in a way the series had not previously attempted.

The plotting is dense to the point that the reference account calls the web of deceit largely incomprehensible, and that is a real criticism rather than a matter of taste. The ending closes on the exposure of the ring and the accounting for the deaths, with the two forces having worked the case from their directions and the intelligence interest served by Dugdale's presence rather than by the squad's arrest.