Keys to the Car

The new Assistant Chief Constable, Ms Cremond, is running Denton while Mullett is on leave, and she has Frost in her sights from her first day. He has conducted an off-the-record chat with dealer Richie Dearne to force a confession — a routine Frost manoeuvre that Cremond treats as a scandal. Dearne is released; Frost is ordered to stay away from him. The tension between the rule-book officer and the rule-bender is the episode's spine, and it snaps when Dearne's bludgeoned body turns up in the boot of a stolen red Mercedes.

The car's owner is Ben Pecksmith, a biomedical company boss whose car was stolen from the golf club by a con man named Harry Plummer — real name Alan Carpenter — who abandoned it at a luxury hotel after running up bills and charming the staff, then stole a Range Rover and headed for Holland with a Dutch woman named Marijka. Frost, working with DS Dorridge, sorts the passengers from the drivers: Carpenter is just a thief smuggling porn tapes, but Marijka is an undercover Dutch drug officer, at the hotel to investigate Pecksmith's company.

The murder, meanwhile, keeps circling Dearne's last hours. His dealer's girlfriend Philly — Pecksmith's stepdaughter — saw the Mercedes at the meeting spot in Fulford Woods, and saw a blue car arrive. The blue car belongs to Warrinder, Dearne's own solicitor — who killed Dearne because the dealer was blackmailing him over a drug addiction, demanding £5,000. The confession is dragged out at gunpoint in a courthouse, by a terrified Luke Hands holding Warrinder hostage. Frost talks Luke down, and even slips the bullet out of the surrendered gun before anyone can be hurt — a detail he admits to no one.

Keys to the Car, written by Malcolm Bradbury and directed by Adrian Shergold, is a triumph of plotting and a battle of wills: Cremond, the systems woman, is forced to acknowledge that Frost's methods work, even as she reprimands him for them. Melanie Thaw — David Jason's real-life daughter — makes Cremond a worthy antagonist, and the episode ends with the system and the detective at a grudging standoff.