Trust Red

A burglar falls from a roof and dies, and Regan and Carter are left with precisely nothing. No leads, no case, just a body. That's where Trust Red begins, and it's an unusually downbeat opening for a show that usually liked to hit the ground running.

The dead man's partner is Red Redgrave, played by John Ronane, and he carries more guilt than the job strictly requires. He feels he should have saved his mate on that roof, but his sight is failing, which for a burglar is about as cruel a diagnosis as you could write. His estranged wife Jean is about to marry someone else. Doubts are crowding in from every side, and the result is a villain having something dangerously close to a midlife crisis.

What interests Regan is the smell of another job. He's fairly sure Red's gang has one more burglary in it, yet Red keeps behaving as though he wants the Squad to catch them. A villain steering his own capture is not something you see every day, and working out why is the real business of the episode.

Richard Harris and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, with Douglas Camfield directing, and the cast around Thaw and Waterman does solid work. Garfield Morgan is back as Haskins, John Alkin as DS Tom Daniels, with John J. Carney as Eric, Sara Clee as Jo, Nigel Humphreys as Con, Hilary Crane as Jean and Gretchen Franklin as Florence the charlady.

The pleasure of Trust Red is watching two proud men circle each other, one losing his nerve and the other pretending he hasn't noticed. The Sweeney was always good at villains who were running out of road, and Ronane gives Red a weary dignity that makes the title feel like a sad joke. Trust, in this world, gets you killed. Or arrested.