Hard Men

Detective Sergeant Davy Freeth comes down from Glasgow with three names and not much else. He is not there to make friends. The three villains are in London to kidnap somebody, he says, and there the explanation ends. He will say no more, even when one of the men turns up dead. Regan, who has never met a Scotsman he couldn't wind up, calls him Jock and gets a face like granite in return.

But the friction is the fun of this one. A kidnap attempt on a little girl goes wrong and the girl escapes, and only then does Freeth admit he has known all along who the real target was: the daughter of Boyd, a Scots heavy living in London. He has already tipped Boyd off about the surviving pair, and the two of them set about doing Regan's job for him while Regan is otherwise engaged. Boyd and Freeth carry most of the load, and the operation only works because all of them, grudgingly, pull together.

James Cosmo plays Freeth with a dourness that could curdle milk, and Thaw is at his most irascible against it. Troy Kennedy Martin and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, Graham Baker directed, and the writing shows its hand in Freeth's silences as much as his speeches. James Warrior's Det. Con. Jellyneck, Stewart Preston's Ross, Jonathan Carr, Alex Norton, Ronnie Letham, Brian Hoskin and Michael Beint supply the menace in roughly equal measure.

The plot is almost secondary, and the episode knows it. Two stubborn men, one of them a long way from home, grinding each other down until the job forces them into the same corner. Everyone here is trying to prove how hard they are, and only the little girl who got away is smart enough to run. That's the show's favourite game, and Hard Men plays it well.