Natural Enemies

"Natural Enemies" puts Charlie Hungerford squarely in the crosshairs, and the series' most comic regular becomes its most sympathetic victim. The trouble begins with a phone call in the night — a woman's voice calling him "Charlie boy", referencing 1972 — and builds through a card left in his house: "The last property deal, Charlie boy, six feet of earth." A doctored newspaper report claims a woman named Alice Turner, an investor in one of his failed companies, was murdered rather than dying in a fire. Someone is coming for him, and they want him to know it.

Andrew Caine's script, directed by Geoffrey Sax, is a psychological thriller in which the attacker is never quite where the police expect. Bergerac, called in, enlists Dr Ruth Gardiner, a psychologist who works with the island's troubled teenagers — a group whose presence keeps intruding on the story. The teens, from poor backgrounds with behavioural problems, are the episode's red herrings and its conscience: Jacky Cook, abandoned by her father, steals cigars as presents for him, hoping he will come back for her if she becomes rich. The calls, the fire in the study, the surveillance — all of it, the episode slowly reveals, comes from inside Hungerford's own circle.

The truth is a neat, cruel irony. The woman making the calls is Cheryl, one of the teenagers — but she is not the instigator. The Lomans, the American couple who have been helping Hungerford set up a leisure complex while quietly conning him, have been using the girl to terrorise him into signing away his assets. The revenge Hungerford feared from his past was actually a present-tense swindle, and his real enemy is the deal he walked into.

The episode is at its best in its portrait of Hungerford under siege: the bluster stripped away, the old man suddenly, genuinely afraid, and Terence Alexander playing the fear without losing the character's essential decency. Susan Wooldridge's psychologist is a strong presence, and the teenage subplot gives the hour a social conscience it wears lightly. The resolution — the Lomans' scheme exposed, the girl freed from their influence — is satisfying without being triumphant. A solid, character-driven hour that shows the seventh series could make Hungerford's fear the engine of a story, and that the people he trusted were his natural enemies all along.