Offshore Trades

"Offshore Trades" is a two-body mystery in the series' best tradition: a dead diver on the beach and a missing film star's wife, investigated at the same time by the same detective. The diver, found by two surfers, has the initials JL in his wetsuit and no one reporting him missing. The missing woman is Moira, wife of French film star Francois Montauban, and the French police want Bergerac to look into it. The two cases seem separate until the island's smallness does its work: the diver was Jacques Lavel, a waiter from Bordeaux who quit suddenly — and Lavel was the lover of Jean, assistant at Lil's new nightclub, and a man who knew something about the drugs moving through the island.

Nick McCarty's script, directed by Robert Tronson, is a patient, salt-crusted procedural. John Shrapnel plays Walter Mitchell, the Australian diving-school owner with a Vietnam past and a flat refusal to let death touch him, and the episode is at its most uncomfortable in the scenes between him and Bergerac — two men who have both seen too much, disagreeing about what it does to you. Adrienne Burgess plays Moira with a wary stillness; the truth, when it surfaces, is that she has left Montauban and the life he offered for the quiet of an island and a man who treats her as a person. Patsy Kensit appears among the guest cast in an early role.

The investigation turns on small, damning details: Lavel's mouthpiece was out when he was found, which means he suffocated rather than drowned; a photograph places him on Mitchell's boat; fish kept in cold storage at Lil's Place turn out to be stuffed with heroin. The resolution has Bergerac grappling Mitchell underwater and unclipping his oxygen tank — a rare moment of physical violence from a detective who usually works with words.

The ending is deliberately sour. Mitchell confesses to killing Lavel but will not talk about the men above him; Moira's body is found by divers as Montauban, who wanted her back for the publicity, leaves the island trading insults with Bergerac. The customs man's line — you never catch the people in charge — hangs over the close. A grim, well-made hour that shows the fourth series' willingness to leave its cases half-solved and its heroes unsettled.