Scope

The episode opens with a rare honour: Wycliffe is awarded the Queen's Medal for Gallantry. Then the job gives him something to earn it on. A policeman named Alan Trier is murdered, and the case arrives with scandal attached. Trier's wife Jane had been having an affair with another officer, which makes the obvious suspects exactly that, obvious. The affair makes two suspects before a single interview, and the whole station knows it.

DCC Roth, abrasive as ever, tells Wycliffe to keep the investigation clean of any scandal that would draw outside criticism. But Wycliffe listens politely, which everyone who knows him recognises as the first sign that he's going to do the opposite. Roth is the kind of senior officer who treats the press as a threat and the truth as a nuisance. Nothing about the affair is as simple as it looks, and nothing is ever obvious to Wycliffe anyway. His instinct is that the case is telling a different story, and the rest of the episode is him proving it.

The investigation moves through the usual corners of Cornish police life: Ch. Insp. Bonner, DI Lane, Joe Duggan, the family connections around Jane Trier and Mrs. Wheeler. Tom Dacre and Adrian Wright circle the edges. The episode is a sturdy one, more interested in the way an honour sits on a man while he works a case that nobody wants him to solve properly. The medal gets its moment and then goes back in the drawer, which feels right for a man who never seemed to want one.

Written by W.J. Burley and John Milne, directed by Alan Wareing. Jack Shepherd as Det. Supt. Wycliffe, with Andrew Bicknell as Alan Trier, Shelagh McLeod as Jane Trier, Clive Francis as Ch. Insp. Bonner, Helen Masters as DI Lane, Michael Nardone as Joe Duggan, Flip Webster as Mrs. Wheeler, Peter Harding as Tom Dacre, Sammy Johnson as Adrian Wright and Raymond Brody as the Landlord.