All for Love

John Bonetti is a violent criminal who steps out of a prison van during a routine transfer and simply walks away from HMP Bodmin. Before long he is back in business as a drugs racketeer, and the police are chasing their own embarrassment. Wycliffe has a theory, though: Jane Hardy, a respectable artist who volunteers at the prison, helped him get out because she fell for him. She is the kind of person nobody suspects, which is exactly why he suspects her. But proving it is another matter.

It is the kind of theory that sounds like a detective's fancy until the first body turns up. The hunt for Bonetti stops being a manhunt and becomes a murder inquiry with a fugitive in it, and the team is racing a clock that nobody reset. Wycliffe's gut has been right before, which is cold comfort while the man is still out there. Every day he is free, the case gets older and the trail gets colder.

Sean Chapman plays Bonetti, all coiled menace, and Jack Shepherd leads as Wycliffe. Jimmy Yuill, Helen Masters and Aaron Harris are Kersey, Lane and Dixon, holding the routine together. David Brocklehurst is CC Birkin, Robin Browne is ACC Waters, Andrew Hilton is the prison governor, and John Bleasdale and George Higgins are the warder and guard who watched the van.

W.J. Burley and Steve Trafford wrote it, Martyn Friend directed, and it opened the second series in June 1995.

All for Love runs on two kinds of danger: the immediate kind, an armed man on the loose, and the slower kind, affection pointed at the wrong person. The title tells you which one the episode thinks is worse. A woman who helps a violent man escape because she loves him is not a villain in the usual sense, which makes her harder for Wycliffe to catch and harder for the viewer to shake. It is a strong way to open a series, with the villain out and Wycliffe chasing a feeling he cannot yet explain to anyone.