Victims

A policeman is shot. Detective Sergeant Taylor takes the bullets and, badly wounded, names his own informant, Jimmy Park, as the man who pulled the trigger. Regan and Carter arrive at the scene and find themselves working a case that points inward: if Park shot his handler, then something about that relationship was already rotten, and Taylor being corrupt is exactly what Eve Fisher wants everyone to believe.

Eve is Park's girlfriend, played by Lynda La Plante years before she became famous for writing Prime Suspect, and her scenes give the episode its slipperiness. She tells Regan that Taylor was bent, then slips her tail to carry money out to Park, who's lying low in an old disused warehouse. Regan follows the trail eventually, of course he does, and the confrontation in the warehouse produces more shots before it produces answers.

Woven through all this is a quieter thread that turns out to be the better one. Haskins is having trouble at home. His wife Doreen, played by Sheila Reid, is starting to lose her grip on reality and living increasingly in the past, and Garfield Morgan plays a man watching someone disappear while standing in front of him. It's a small part of the running time and the most affecting.

Roger Marshall and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it and Ben Bolt directed, with John Alkin as DS Tom Daniels, Elizabeth Burger as Joan, George Innes as Willoughby and Gillian Rhind as WPC Jackson.

The title spreads itself generously. Taylor is a victim, arguably; so is Park, depending on whose account you take; and Doreen Haskins most plainly of all. The Sweeney rarely gave its authority figures home lives, and doing it here, in the last series, gives Haskins a depth the show had never previously bothered to grant him.