A Perfect Recapture

"A Perfect Recapture" is the second series' coldest, most procedural hour — a ten-year-old theft, a man who walked out of a top-security prison, and a trail of marked francs that finally gives him away. It begins with a small, strange clue: Marianne, asleep on her boat, hears a plane fly over and sees a wheel drop off into the sea. The plane lands roughly in a field, and the two people on board — Michel Laborde and Chantal Coutard — carry a briefcase full of French bank notes. The wheel, fished out of the water by Marianne, ends up on Bergerac's desk. And the photograph Crozier shows him matches: Keith Prescott, on the run for ten years, who hacked into the police computer and stole two million pounds by collecting the wages of fictional officers.

Ed Devereaux plays Detective Chief Inspector Ronald West, the man who arrested Prescott eleven years ago and has pursued him ever since — a dogged, weary mainland detective whose obsession gives the episode its title. Paul Wheeler's script is interested in patience and evidence: the dropped wheel, the marked notes, the ex-wife who never remarried and may have stayed in touch. Paul Ciappessoni directs with a quiet, deliberate pace suited to a hunt that moves from a stray object to a hidden man.

The episode is a proper police procedural in a series that often wore its policing lightly. Bergerac and West work two ends of the same trail — the mainland detective knows the man, the island detective knows the ground — and the partnership between them, professional and faintly amused, is the hour's relationship. The scale of the original theft gives the story weight without requiring a large cast, and the resolution, when it comes, is earned through detail rather than confrontation.

It is a solid, puzzle-driven instalment that shows the series could handle a long-range financial crime as readily as a personal attack or a local death. The computer-embezzler premise was quietly contemporary for 1983, and the marked francs make the chase readable. A steady, well-made entry that rewards attention, and a reminder that Bergerac's best hours were often the quietest.