Everest Was Also Conquered

It begins with a dying man's confession. A former head of MI6, on his deathbed, tells the truth about a corruption trial from two decades earlier: Suzie Carter, the key witness, did not kill herself by jumping from a window. She was pushed, by the police officers who were supposed to be guarding her. The confession reopens a case nobody wanted reopened, and the danger does not stay in the past. Someone starts killing the officers involved, one by one, and the question becomes who is ordering the hits and why.

The show leans into the institutional rot here. The men who pushed Carter have spent twenty years believing they got away with it, and now the bill is being presented in person. There is no comfort in the confession, only a debt that somebody has decided to collect with interest. Bodie and Doyle work the case with a new young colleague called Tony, and the investigation winds through a list of suspects that reads like a roll-call of old-school British character acting. The assassin is always a step ahead, which keeps the pressure on from the first killing to the last.

Brian Clemens wrote it and Francis Megahy directed. Michael Denison is Lord Derrington, Richard Greene is Neil Turvey, with Ann Lynn as Ann Berry, Kathleen Byron as Mrs. Turner, Charles Keating as Frank Goodman, Gary Waldhorn as Turner and Helen Cotterill as Sally. Greene had been television's Robin Hood two decades earlier, which gives the casting a sly echo: the outlaw back in a story about men who broke the law to enforce it.

It is a story about the past refusing to stay buried, told with the series' usual efficiency. The officers who thought they had outrun it find out otherwise, and the episode ends on the understanding that some mountains take a very long time to climb.