The Most Suitable Person

"The Most Suitable Person" finds the department short-handed. With only one Sandbagger left on the books, Burnside starts looking for new blood, and the job offer goes to Laura Dickens. She takes the work seriously and has no illusions about what it will cost, which is exactly why he wants her. The recruitment runs alongside everything else that happens this week, and the two strands turn out to be closer than they look. Then an SIS officer, the number two man from Algiers, turns up dead in Gibraltar.

Burnside sends Willie Caine to find out what the man was doing there, and Dickens to Algiers to find out what he was doing before that. Two investigations, one body, and the two halves of the case only make sense together.

The second problem lands closer to home. A CIA colleague tells Burnside that an SIS officer called Colin Grove has been seeing a psychiatrist privately, and there is real worry the doctor is a foreign agent. If that is true, the special relationship between the CIA and the SIS is suddenly worth very little. The episode is at its best here, because the threat is entirely administrative. Nobody has been shot. A question mark over one officer's head could undo decades of trust.

Ian MacKintosh wrote it, David Reynolds directed. Roy Marsden anchors it as Burnside, with Richard Vernon's 'C', Ray Lonnen's Willie Caine and Diane Keen's Laura Dickens around him. Elizabeth Bennett plays Diane Lawler, Jerome Willis Matthew Peele, Bob Sherman Jeff Ross, Stephen Greif Detective Chief Inspector Gomez, John F. Landry Stephen Jackson and Christopher Benjamin David Follett.

Murder in Gibraltar turns out to be the easy part. But the damage one compromised officer could do is what keeps Burnside up at night, and the show knows which of the two is worth worrying about.