Penny for the Guy

A young boy, Dean Anderton, dies suspiciously on Halloween night, and the autopsy is a horror story: he had been chloroformed, a finger surgically removed, and choked on his own vomit. The next day another child, Bobby Kirkby, is kidnapped, and a ransom note lands on the desk of Sir Richard Cordwell, the wealthy boss of a supermarket chain, demanding £500,000. Cordwell — a man who sees a publicity opportunity in everything, even his own child's near-miss — agrees to pay.

The ransom drop goes wrong. an elderly man, Henry Finch, turns up with his dog, finds the money — and is clubbed by an unknown assailant who makes off with the cash. Frost, working with the ambitious DS Liz Maud, follows a thread from a year earlier: the chain had unknowingly taken £40,000 in fake notes and, unable to deposit them, passed them on to customers under a vow of silence. The trail leads to a suspect with an alibi for the kidnapping — and to Finch himself. The old man is dying, and the truth is a tragedy: Cordwell fired Finch's wife when she attempted to report the fake notes, and she took her own life. Finch's revenge was to hurt Cordwell — but he required a living child for the ransom, and took Bobby when Dean died accidentally. Frost finds Bobby alive in a mill, and, with no direct evidence, plants the receipt that lets the police charge Finch.

The second case is a sharp joke: teenager Carol Stansfield's kidnapping turns out to have been staged by Carol herself, with friends, to squeeze money from her inattentive father.

Penny for the Guy, written by Malcolm Bradbury and directed by Paul Seed, is a dark fairy tale with a Christmas-card sting. Philip Stone's Henry Finch — frail, furious, undone by love — is one of the series' great guest performances, and the episode's moral is vintage Frost: the most dangerous people in Denton are the ones the town has wronged. Stephen Moyer, years before True Blood, lurks in the background as DC Burton.

A Christmas episode with teeth: a dying man's revenge, a supermarket tycoon's vanity, and a detective who plants evidence to see justice done. Philip Stone's Finch is unforgettable. A Christmas tale with a sting, anchored by a superb guest turn.