The Waiting Game

"The Waiting Game" is the final series' most paranoid hour — a story about trade licences, a company that does not exist and the men who want Bergerac silenced. Hired by the solicitors Lesgate and Maloney to check trade-license applications, Bergerac is handed one that should be routine: the Fort William Paper Company, registered to a headquarters in Salisbury. The address is a house inhabited by an elderly woman and her lodger; the branch offices are a cafe and other innocuous buildings. The company is a front, and the moment Bergerac starts asking questions, a man named Stephen starts following him — and another named Faraday, an acquaintance of Hungerford's who seems to be following Danielle and Blakemore from France, starts making calls.

David Crane's script, directed by Colm Villa, is a story about the waiting game of the title — the patience of the men watching Bergerac, and his own patience in refusing to be scared off. The strike on his head with a baseball bat, the broken-in office, the murdered friend — Gustave, the small-time thief Bergerac bailed, who broke into Faraday's place and found money and weapons in the cellar, and was found dead, supposedly a hit-and-run — all of it is theatre, designed to make a private detective drop a case he was paid to check. Elizabeth Spriggs, in a small but memorable role, is the elderly woman who knows nothing and says it twice.

The resolution is a trap with multiple layers. Faraday, cornered, offers to show Bergerac how Gustave was murdered and by whom, planting evidence to implicate Stephen — who arrives with a gun just as Ben arrives with armed officers. The three of them — Faraday, Stephen and Angie — are arrested, their bathroom-fitting company exposed as a cover for arms dealing. Bergerac, who has been one step ahead the whole time, collects his fee and heads back to France.

It is a taut, well-constructed hour that shows the final series' private-eye format at full stretch — the detective working alone, the Bureau suspicious, the danger real. John Shrapnel's Faraday is a worthy antagonist, and the episode's message — that the waiting game only ends when someone stops waiting — is pure Bergerac. A strong entry in the final run.