Chance

Maggie spends a day at the law courts and it nearly finishes her. She sits through the slow machinery of justice, watching evidence get picked apart by men in wigs, while the paperwork on her desk at the station quietly breeds. All she wants is to get back to her own cases. The courts frustrate her because they run on waiting, and Maggie is built for doing.

But the episode has other plans, and they're sneaky ones. The clue to a major crime turns out to be sitting in the files all along, hidden among the routine sheets nobody glamorous would ever look at. It's the sort of twist that would feel cheap in a show that hadn't earned it. Here, it's just the natural result of an hour that has spent its whole running time insisting that boring police work is still police work.

Patricia Hooker and Terence Feely wrote it, and David Askey directed with the same unhurried patience the script asks for. John Gregg's Simon Fox is the man whose paperwork matters more than he knows, and Christopher Driscoll's Tony Fielden is the kind of young copper every station has one of, reliable and unshowy. Betty Romaine's Bertha Hennessey is the sort of witness who turns up with an opinion and a handbag. Ian Price's Mr Ryan, Artro Morris's Mr Sharpe and Graham Rowe's Mr Johnson each contribute their small piece. James Ottaway's George Taylor gets a moment or two of his usual grumbling, and Peter Spraggon's Station Officer is on hand.

The episode's quiet argument is that most police work is dull until it suddenly isn't. Paperwork, it turns out, has a memory of its own. Maggie would rather be solving crimes than watching them be tried. By the end she's grateful for the pile on her desk, and so is the viewer.