When the Heat Cools Off

Six years before this episode begins, Doyle was a policeman in London's Docklands, and a shoot-out there ended with fatalities, and Bill Haydon ended up in prison on the strength of it. It is the kind of case a man files away and tries not to think about. Then Haydon's daughter Jill turns up at CI5 with what she says is fresh evidence that clears her father, and she asks Doyle to reopen the case.

The episode does not pretend the request is simple. Doyle agrees in a professional spirit, and then the professional part starts to blur. He likes Jill Haydon, and the more he likes her the harder it is to say whether he is investigating the case or hoping she is right. The question of whether he jailed the wrong man gets tangled up with the question of whether he wants to have jailed the wrong man, and the show is smart enough to leave the two questions knotted together for most of its running time. Every step of the old investigation has to be walked again, and the original verdict keeps looking less certain.

Brian Clemens wrote it and Ray Austin directed. Lalla Ward plays Jill with a quiet seriousness that keeps the romance from tipping into melodrama, and Peter Hughes is Bill Haydon, with Bernard Kay as Harry Scott, Graham Weston as Syd Parker, Shelagh Fraser as Mrs. Wilson, Gerald Sim as a minister and Arthur White as Freddy. Ward would later marry Tom Baker and spend a season as Romana in Doctor Who, but she is properly good here entirely on her own terms.

It is a gentler episode than most of the series, more concerned with doubt than gunfire. And doubt, for a man like Doyle, is the harder enemy. He has to decide what he believes, and he has to do it while the girl whose case he is judging sits across the table watching him.