The Lost Chord

A number of extremist politicians die in mysterious circumstances. The deaths look at first like separate events, and the squad's task is to find what connects them. The trail leads the Inter City Squad out of its usual ground and into the academic world of Cambridge and the upper reaches of the law, because the deaths touch a professor, a peer and a barrister as well as the politicians themselves.

Dugdale's presence marks the episode as one with a political or intelligence dimension, and his ambiguity is the engine of it. He is the Foreign Office and Secret Intelligence Service figure who appears when the government has an interest, and his role is not necessarily to help the squad, only to steer matters when it suits the government. The squad therefore cannot tell whether Dugdale is assisting the investigation or containing it, and the episode keeps that question open long enough for it to do real work. Michael Gough plays Professor Whittingham, Richard Vernon Sir Geoffrey, and Graeme Garden the barrister Nigel Cruickshank QC, with Rupert Everett appearing as Lord Plural in an early credited screen role. A judge, a clerk of the court and a jury foreman in the cast indicate that a courtroom sequence is part of the resolution, and the credited police figures include DC Eddie Swanson, Det. Supt. Billy Wood, DS Jacklin and DI Walker. The deaths are found to be connected and the responsible party identified, with the courtroom providing the means by which the case is tested and settled, and Dugdale's involvement understood for what it is rather than for what the squad assumed.

The setting is a departure. Cambridge widens a series whose home patch is the north-west and whose national remit had previously taken it to London, Edinburgh and Liverpool, and the courtroom widens the range of institutions to include the law and the academy. That is where the title's suggestion of an unfinished or missing piece of music gains its force, because the squad's outsider status is turned against it: a stranger from a national squad has no standing in Cambridge or in a court of law. The mystery is structured around class and institution, with a peer, a professor and a barrister acting as both suspects and gatekeepers of information, and the deaths of extremist politicians raising the question of whether political violence is crime or policy. The episode leaves that question open enough for Dugdale's ambiguity to do its work, and the courtroom resolution asks whether the law can be trusted to finish what the police start.

The guest cast is unusually deep for a single episode, and the depth is the point. Gough, Vernon and Garden give the establishment a set of distinct faces rather than a single villainous type, which is what a story about respectable people concealing something requires. Bill Gilmour directs, a long-standing Granada director who had worked on the series since Series 1 and who also directed the following episode, and Alf Joint is credited as fight arranger, which confirms staged physical action alongside the legal and academic material. The fight scenes are the episode's admitted weakness even by the assessment of the fan guide that praises it most, sitting awkwardly beside everything else.

The precise mechanism of the deaths and the identity of the culprit are not spelled out in any located source, so the resolution here is described in terms of what the credited courtroom figures and the commentary support. What the episode does establish is the strongest claim in the run to the political-intrigue strand that runs from Series 4 into the spin-off Bulman, where Dugdale becomes a regular. It is also a notable early credit for Rupert Everett.