Low Profile

"Low Profile" is a story about a man who came back for his mother, told through the series' favourite machinery of property and secrets. A London gangster, BJ Farrell — played with a coiled, watchful stillness by Iain Cuthbertson — arrives on the island with his associates and starts viewing unremarkable properties through an estate agent. Bergerac recognises him immediately: a man found abandoned outside a hospital as a baby, who grew up to be one of London's most dangerous property dealers. The only house on the viewing list that is not unremarkable belongs to Miss Broome, a drunken old eccentric played by Avril Elgar, who reads the shipping news and slaps her maid. The two of them, it eventually emerges, are mother and son.

The episode runs two scams in parallel. The Deep Gold expedition — a treasure hunt for a sunken boat called Isabelle, promised to find Catholic gold — is a fraud: the crew has found the wreck empty and plans to break it up and scatter it to claim failure and recoup from investors. The fake chalice they show to Farrell's men is identified as a fake within hours. Roger Davenport's script, directed by David Reynolds, keeps the two threads separate long enough for the audience to share Bergerac's growing certainty that the series of meetings is a cover — that only one of the properties actually matters.

The emotional core is the reunion at the end. Miss Broome, it turns out, was once a woman of easy virtue who had a son out of marriage; the respectable businessman Rupert Imison, who wants to buy the factory from Farrell, hired detectives to uncover the secret and has been using it against her. When the assassin's shot misses because Bergerac throws a rock, and Farrell learns the truth — that his mother never knew who his father was — the gangster's response is unexpectedly tender: he will look after her now, and they will not hide anymore. Imison, in turn, is given a beating and an ultimatum: sell up and leave the country within three months.

The coda is the series at its most rueful. Crozier and Bergerac count what they caught — a hired shooter who isn't talking — while Farrell leaves the island and the Deep Gold crew vanish without a proper investigation. "All the problems have simply been moved on to somewhere else," Bergerac laments. A clever, melancholy hour that pairs a gangster's homecoming with a detective's frustration.