A Free Weekend in the Country

The Inter City Squad attends a residential weekend seminar on urban terrorism, intended to broaden the officers' expertise in undercover and counter-terrorist work. The premise is that a hotel full of policemen taking a course should be about the safest place in the country. Instead a murder is committed there, and it quickly becomes likely that the killer is one of the police officers present. The squad spends the weekend among its own kind working out which of the visiting officers is responsible, and the suspense comes from the fact that the unit's usual method, getting in among strangers and blending, is useless when everyone in the room is trained to spot an operative.

A senior female police officer is the victim. The seminar attendees are the suspects, and the guest cast is built almost entirely of officers: Kenneth Cope as Detective Chief Superintendent Miller, Derek Fowlds as DI Ken Driver, Kenneth Cranham as DCI Jim Lennard, Caroline Hutchison as DI Barbara Webb, Fred Pearson as Detective Superintendent Donald Gray, Annette Ekblom as DS Liz Croft and a further group of senior and junior officers among them. The investigating officers work out which of the attending policemen is the killer, and the crime is shown to involve one officer against another. The consequence is institutional rather than personal: the episode confirms the series' outsider premise, that the squad's value is that they do not belong to the local network, by showing that the local network is where the danger is.

The closed setting is the episode's defining strength. A fixed group, a single location, a body, and a killer who must be one of the assembled guests is the classic shape of a mystery, and it is unusual for this series because the standard undercover premise is inverted. The squad cannot hide their identities in a room of police officers and must instead detect in the ordinary way, which is a test of the unit that the programme rarely sets itself. Cope, Fowlds and Cranham give it its weight as three very different senior officers, and casting actors of that experience makes the audience distrust them in rotation, which is exactly the effect a whodunit among policemen needs. Henderson's Bulman is at a disadvantage for once, and the episode uses that to show how much of his method depends on being unknown.

Policing as an institution is the subject. The murderer is a policeman, the victim a policewoman, and the seminar's purpose is to train officers in a skill one of them is abusing. That raises the question of what happens when the protectors are the threat, which is the series' recurring moral worry and the same note struck by A Swift and Evil Rozzer earlier in the season. Placing a senior woman officer as the victim, and DI Barbara Webb and DS Liz Croft among the senior attending officers, puts women at the professional top of the scene as well as at its centre.

The honest weakness is the balance of the cast. With so many attending officers among the suspects, the regulars are given comparatively little to do and the guest cast carries most of the hour. Bennett in particular is underused. The identity of the murderer is not named in any located source, nor is the victim, and neither is asserted here. The episode is confined to a single location, which suits a one-hour mystery and also keeps production economical, since a course of officers at a hotel needs fewer locations than a story following a city investigation. Bill Gilmour directs, his second of the season and his second consecutive, and the mediagems guide rates it a well-executed example of the house style, the second of the season's episodes most fully built on the idea that the worst danger lies inside the institution.