Cause and Effect

A young man walks into a station and confesses to a crime he did not commit. He is articulate, well educated, and completely believable, which is exactly the problem. He names the crime calmly, gives details only the guilty should know, and the room goes quiet around him. Mark Livesey's confession lands on Maggie's desk, and the case turns out to be about why a smart man would do something so self-destructive.

The second half of the episode is closer to home. Steve, her son, comes to her with a problem that needs a father's answer, and she is not equipped to give one. Maggie has run the household single-handed for long enough that the request lands like a bill she did not see coming. Nigel Rathbone plays Steve with the awkwardness of a boy who knows he has asked the wrong parent. The two strands feed each other: the false confession and the household unease are both about people trying to protect someone by lying to themselves.

Brian Bovell is very good as Mark Livesey, and Mary Peach gives Paula Livesey a quiet dignity that explains a lot about where Mark gets his stubbornness. Guy James and Terence Feely wrote the script, Nic Phillips directed, and the supporting cast keeps the station hum: Frank Mills's Mr Coombs and Joyce Windsor's Rene do their bit, and Colin Russell's PC Lynes makes the place feel lived in. It is a small case, the sort that would barely make the papers, and that is rather the point.

It aired on 5 November 1982, and it is one of those episodes where the crime matters less than the people around it. Maggie solves the professional puzzle and still goes home to a question she cannot answer. And that is the point. There is no tidy resolution to the domestic thread, and none is offered.