A Swift and Evil Rozzer

A group of apparently respectable businessmen decide that crime is a quicker route to money than business, and their chosen crime is kidnapping. They abduct a prominent politician, and the Inter City Squad picks up the trail because the offence crosses the boundaries a local force would police alone. John Castle, Dudley Sutton, Barry Stanton, Geoffrey Bateman and Charles Keating play the men at the centre of the conspiracy, with Catherine Schell among those around them.

The episode has two halves pulling in different directions. Publicly, Bulman is suspended from the force. The suspension is presented as though it might be real, and the guide reads it as only seemingly a suspension, which points to Bulman operating outside his official authority to keep the investigation moving while the institution he belongs to has formally put him aside. Behind that, he is trying to find the whereabouts of a kidnapped girl, and the search runs in parallel with the squad's pursuit of the businessmen. The title's promise of a swift and evil policeman is answered inside the story rather than by the squad, since the crooks include or reach a man who behaves as violently as any villain while holding, or having held, the position of a police officer.

The suspension device is what makes the hour worth its place. It takes Bulman's authority away and forces him to work as the outsider the series title always claimed he was, which is the central proposition of the programme tested in the most direct way available. Bulman without a warrant is still Bulman, and the episode lets him work the only way he works, by persuasion and pretence rather than by authority. Castle and Sutton give the conspiracy two different kinds of menace, Castle the smooth and entitled, Sutton the frayed and dangerous, and the casting keeps the businessmen from reading as a single undifferentiated villain. McManus's Lambie is used to hold the line between the force's rules and the squad's methods.

Blanch gets the episode's running joke. Willis strides through the office quoting Shakespeare, which is usually Bulman's habit rather than his, and the reversal turns the character's best-known quirk into a measure of how much Willis has absorbed from his partner. It is one of the small ways the final series shows its leads having spent five years together.

The title itself has a life of its own. The mediagems guide records that the phrase the swift and evil rozzer is quoted as a reference inside the Series 3 episode A Racing Certainty, which means the line had already been circulating inside the show's own earlier scripts before it became the name of an episode two years later. That piece of internal history is the episode's lasting curiosity, and it is a reminder of how much of this series was written by the same hand over five years.

The honest weakness is the structure. Two plots, the political kidnapping and the search for the girl, pull against each other, and a viewer taking the suspension at face value will find the middle of the episode confusing about who is and is not acting officially. The exact meaning of the suspension is not fully documented either: one database states plainly that Bulman is suspended while the fan guide reads it as only seemingly so, and both readings are recorded rather than one chosen. Fiona Mollison is billed as Bennett in some episode lists and not in the credited names recorded for this one, so her presence is left unasserted.