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Season five opens with Wycliffe in a police nursing home, recovering from Patrick Durno's attempt on his life and weighing up early retirement. The man who never stops working is being forced to sit still, and it doesn't suit him. It is, quietly, the show's way of asking whether a copper like Wycliffe can ever really switch off. While he convalesces, the job goes on without him.

Kersey gets the lead on a proper mess. Farmer Miller has declared war on the anglers who are legally fishing on his land, and the tension is already simmering when a salmon poacher turns up dead. The dead man had been poaching salmon, and nobody in the village is going to make it easy for the police. Kersey takes charge of the enquiry, and Acting DCI Lane has to swallow it. She's tempted to move on and up, makes a bid for promotion that goes nowhere, and stays in the thick of it anyway. Kersey does the patient work and reels in the killer himself.

The two halves of the episode run side by side. The contrast does both of them favours: Wycliffe watching from a hospital bed, Kersey doing the job in waders and rain. The bed-bound half of the story is the quieter one, and it carries just as much weight. But in the end, Wycliffe turns down the easy exit. He rejects the retirement talk and goes back to work, which is the only ending that would have felt right for him.

Written by W.J. Burley and Arthur McKenzie. Jack Shepherd directed as well as starring as Det. Supt. Wycliffe, with Jimmy Yuill as DI Kersey, Jeff Nuttall as David Miller, Adie Allen as Janet Miller, Kathryn Allerston as the Nurse, James Taylor as the Consultant, Quentin Jones as the Young Doctor, and Martin Delaney, Glenn Hanning and Jeremy Parnell as the fishermen.