Peacemaker

Peacemaker gives Rocky his best case so far and Ken one of his most awkward. The first begins with a disappearance. Bograt, a loutish heavy-metal singer, walks out after a violent row with his girlfriend just as his band, the Necros, are about to make a comeback. His agent, Lenny Bright, hires Margaret to find him.

Rocky is a devoted fan of the Necros and is delighted to help. Margaret is less delighted when the record company sends its own investigator, Bert Ostler, and the two take an instant dislike to each other. Rocky, visiting Bograt's girlfriend, Nikki, finds her trying to seduce him just as Bograt bursts in and accuses him of being her new lover.

It is Rocky who finds him in the end, up on the scaffolding outside the Ratpit, the club where the band used to play, threatening to throw himself off because his life is a mess. Rocky talks him down. The mystery of the singer's name is also solved: he was born Bogdan Ratachinsky.

Ken's case is a divorce. Elaine Bache hires him to find her ex-husband, Derek, who has stopped paying maintenance. Ken tracks him to a shooting club, and he and Harry pose as divorced men to win his confidence. Over a game of poker, Derek admits that he takes part of his salary in cash to keep it out of his ex-wife's hands.

Harry then makes a discovery of his own. Entertaining a party of Dutch engineers, he breaks the bracelet of their leader, Greta Van De Murge, and takes it to a jeweller's, where he sees Elaine with a very rich jeweller. Her claim to be destitute is false. Ken and Margaret fall out: she wants him to act for the client, and he wants to tell Derek.

Harry finds a way round it. Divorced himself, he sympathises with Derek. He telephones Derek's firm, which sells bathroom furniture, pretending to be Elaine's lover, and orders an expensive and tasteless bathroom to be fitted at her house. Derek realises that his ex-wife is living with another man and resolves to hire a detective to prove it.

Diane Culverhouse and Julian Spilsbury wrote the script and Bruce MacDonald directs. Robin Askwith plays Bograt and Karl Howman his agent, with Tessa Wyatt as Elaine and Alexandra Bastedo as Greta, and the cast list includes a young Clive Owen.

The divorce story is the more interesting of the two, because it asks what Ken owes a client who is lying to him. Harry's solution lets Ken keep his word to Elaine while making sure the truth reaches Derek, a piece of mischief that is also a piece of justice.

The weakness is Bograt's crisis. A man threatening to jump is a serious scene, and the episode surrounds it with jokes about heavy metal and a girlfriend's advances. But it gives Neil Morrissey a rare chance to carry a case alone, and Rocky, the series' dimmest regular, turns out to be the one who brings the singer down safely.