Gunfire

Alan Cade has never been a man for guns, and this episode is built to test that view. An armed robbery on a countryside mansion forces the Chief Constable to reconsider where he stands on firearms, and the setting makes it personal. The violence lands in somebody's home, and that changes the argument. There are no armed response units on standby here. It is a quiet house in the country, and the force is caught unprepared.

The case pulls the departments into one another's orbit, and none of them is used to being watched. Detectives and uniformed officers, with the command structure above them, all work the same crime while the temperature rises around the question of armed policing. Cade's team pieces together what happened and tries to understand what would drive such a calculated attack on a property so isolated. The procedure matters as much as the chase, and the episode lets both breathe instead of rushing to a verdict. Nobody gets an easy answer, which is rather the point.

Martin Shaw plays Chief Constable Alan Cade, with Julian Glover as Andrew Blake and Bosco Hogan as Deputy Chief Constable Wes Morton. Gillian Bevan is Det. Supt. Rose Penfold and Michael Cochrane is Nigel Crimmond. The ranks fill out with Davyd Harries as Sam Lester, Brian Bovell as PC Charlie Webb, Ken Hutchison as Bernie Chandler, Richard Haddon as Jakie Hunt and Cameron Lock as Dick Barton. Maggie Allen and Jeffrey Caine wrote it, and Tom Cotter directed.

But the real subject is Cade's own certainty, and it holds up less well than he would like. Armed crime in the English countryside used to feel like somebody else's problem, and here it is handed to him on his own patch. The drama works best in the small moments between the manoeuvring, when a chief constable who has spent a career reasoning his way through questions of force suddenly has to answer them with a deadline attached. Watching a man's beliefs get knocked about by real events is a quiet pleasure, and Gunfire delivers it without raising its voice.