On Account

"On Account" (1997) opens with a parent's ordinary errand turned nightmare: seven jars of baby food on a supermarket shelf, each one poisoned, each one a message from a blackmailer demanding £50,000. The demand is almost a side issue. The motive, it emerges, is personal — revenge aimed at one specific victim, with the shop and its customers simply in the way.

Meanwhile, the force is busy investigating itself. DI Kersey is under the microscope of Superintendent Le Page, whose enquiry follows the death of Sennam while in custody. Kersey doesn't make it easy. The two men's hostility is out in the open from the first exchange, sharpened whenever the case brings them together. And yet it's Wycliffe who puts in the strongest defence of his colleague, quietly, methodically refusing to let the enquiry rewrite what he knows of the man.

The episode keeps both fires burning. Around the poisoned jars move Miles Trednor and his wife Shirley, the supermarket's corner of the story, while DCC Stevens and DI Lane keep the wider machinery of police life ticking. Janet and Gillian appear in the margins, domestic anchors in a week that feels anything but domestic. It's a structure that suits the show: the horror stays up front, and the slow professional wound underneath gives it weight.

Written by W.J. Burley and Kevin Clarke, directed by David Innes Edwards, and anchored by Jack Shepherd as Wycliffe with Michael Attwell as DCC Stevens, Sharon Duce as Supt. Le Page, Jimmy Yuill as DI Kersey, Jack Ellis as Miles Trednor, Helen Masters as DI Lane, Brigid Zengeni as Janet, Judy Norman as Shirley Trednor, Nicola Jeffries as WPC Sally Miller and Jane Annesley as Gillian.

Not the show's best-known episode. But it does something quietly right: it remembers that a poisoned jar is a crime against a family, and that the enquiry in the same building is a crime against a man's career. Both deserve taking seriously.