Jack Or Knave

The Police Complaints Department has an allegation of corruption against Regan, and a security van gets robbed the same week. A guard is murdered during the payroll snatch, but another identifies one of the robbers, so the case has a thread to pull. It should be a straightforward week. It isn't.

The local force under Chief Superintendent Canning has had no luck with the gang, so the Sweeney are called in, and Canning takes this about as well as you'd expect. He and Regan were contemporaries once, and now they clash at every turn; when Regan goes off and apprehends the entire gang without telling him, Canning is far from happy. Worse comes when Regan needs help with the old accusation, because the corruption charge reaches back nine years and Canning, who was there at the time, refuses to help him. Carter eventually finds someone who will, and that's the difference between the two men: one keeps a grudge warm, the other goes looking for a witness. Nine years is a long time to hold a grudge, but some men manage it.

Ted Childs and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it and Tom Clegg directed, with Garfield Morgan as Haskins and Barrie Ingham making Canning a properly chilly adversary, the sort who mistakes procedure for principle. Richard Griffiths plays Ronnie Harries, with Jo Warne as Gloria Bartley, Ralph Nossek as Duxbury, David Casey as Jackson, Andrew Downie as Bishop and Jane Cussons as Sonia Driffield.

As a near-final episode of the series, Jack Or Knave knows what it's doing: put the Flying Squad's least procedural man in front of the most procedural inquiry imaginable and watch him seethe. The whole experience leaves Regan extremely bitter, and Thaw plays the bitterness beautifully. The title asks its question plainly, and the episode is honest enough to leave a little doubt hanging.