Pasts

Ho is fed up with routine searches and an irritable Berwick, and when a pile of bones is found in a derelict house he sees his chance to escape both. The seventh episode of the second series is the run's only cold case, and the second of the two written by Edward Boyd.

The derelict house makes redevelopment part of the plot rather than the scenery. A pile of bones in an empty building means a death nobody reported, in a district being emptied and revalued, and Ho's decision to take it on is a character statement: he chooses the older, harder enquiry over the week's assigned work and his superior's temper. What the bones turn out to be, who the dead person was and how Ho identifies them are not recorded in any source, and nothing of the kind is supplied here.

The guest cast gives the case its authorities. James Ellis plays Father Gorman, Peter Copley plays Cunninghame-Price and John Collin plays Arbuckle, with Patsy Smart as Mrs Jenkins, Declan Mulholland as a foreman and Ray Float as a postman. Albert Moses returns as Mr Patel for the third time in the run, after Income Tax in 1981 and Oblomov four weeks earlier. IMDb adds Mitzi Mueller as Titania and William Palmer as Harold, plus Eli and Hatman, played by Troy Foster and Dana Michie, who both appeared in Oblomov and are the second series' recurring street characters.

Leonard Lewis directed his only episode of the run, which is worth recording for a reason beyond this series: he had produced Rockliffe's Babies, the parent run of the Rockliffe series also covered on this site. Two of the shows in this batch share a production hand, and this episode is where it shows.

The episode's method is identification and records, the slowest work the format allows, rather than the informant-led enquiries of the surrounding weeks. That makes it the second series' least typical hour in procedure and its most typical in theme, because a district with bones in it is a district with a past, and Ho's own past is the run's running story.

Yip's Ho is given the episode's central choice, and Derek Martin's Berwick is at his least sympathetic, which is what makes the choice meaningful. The relationship between them had been the show's engine for two years, and an episode in which the detective simply avoids his superior states the position more clearly than any argument between them could.

IMDb records 7.6 from 5 votes. No contemporary review and no audience figure exist, and the series' viewers column in Wikipedia is empty for all fourteen episodes.

What cannot be recovered is the identification itself, the answer to the question a cold case exists to ask. It is unrecorded, and it is not invented here. What is left is a 1982 BBC hour in which a detective chooses a pile of bones over a week of ordinary work, with James Ellis and Peter Copley in the guest cast and a derelict London house at the centre of it.