To Hell with Justice

The alarm is raised by a holiday snapshot, more or less. Edward Tyler, the Director of Intelligence, is spotted on Malta with a younger German woman, and nobody back in Whitehall can decide whether she's a holiday romance or a contact. The rumour makes its way to the top, and it sits there. Tyler is one of their own, and that makes the gossip worse than any tip about a foreign agent.

Burnside doesn't wait for an answer he can believe. He quietly sends the Sandbaggers out to keep an eye on Tyler while he finishes his holiday, which is a polite way of saying they are to watch their own boss's conduct abroad. The team ends up with the most awkward job in intelligence work: surveillance of a senior colleague, with all the professional suspicion that implies and the personal awkwardness that comes free with it. When personal lives get tangled up with national security, somebody has to do the watching, and it's never comfortable when the somebody is the people who know him. Nobody enjoys it, least of all the men doing the watching.

Written by Ian MacKintosh and directed by Peter Cregeen, first shown on 16 June 1980. Roy Marsden leads as Burnside, with Ray Lonnen's Willie Caine and Michael Cashman's Mike Wallace on the ground. Alan MacNaughtan, Jerome Willis, Dennis Burgess as 'C', Sue Holderness, Bob Sherman, John Alkin and Mark Eden complete the cast.

The episode earns its keep in the discomfort. Tyler may be innocent, and the woman may be exactly what she looks like. But the watching happens anyway, and the watching is the point. That's what an intelligence service does to its own people when it stops trusting them. Trust, once dented, is not easily repaired, and Tyler's holiday costs more than a few days of leave.