Love Letters From a Dead Man

Love Letters From a Dead Man opens with a harassed cyclist. Harry, driving to Woodcote Park, sees a racing cyclist being pestered by a souped-up car. The cyclist is Ian, Helen's nephew, who is staying at the hotel while he trains for a road race through the centre of Nottingham. The man in the car is Greg Simpson, who manages a racing team and wants Ian to join it, and who threatens to publish a letter showing that Ian once helped a friend win a race by arrangement.

Harry finds his own weapon. Simpson's team doctor is prescribing drugs to addicts, which would not please the team's sponsor, a health-food company. Faced with mutual blackmail, Simpson backs down.

Ken has a stranger case. Barbara Lake is receiving love letters that appear to come from her husband, Ronnie, a bank robber who died in a plane crash six months earlier. Either he is alive or the letters are forged. Laura and Rocky study the newspaper coverage of the crash, and Ken talks to an old friend, Sergeant Hatchard. The more they learn, the surer they are that Ronnie did die. Hatchard adds that Ronnie had been involved in a robbery just before his death, and the money was never found.

Barbara's house is watched. She receives a parcel containing a large sum, then a letter asking her to meet in "our special place", Room 324 in a hotel. Ken waits with her. When he goes to check a noise on the fire escape, she lifts a ceiling tile in the bathroom and takes out a holdall that is evidently the proceeds of the robbery.

Laura, meanwhile, is complaining that she is never given anything interesting to do when a suave man called Charlie Cochrane appears at the office wanting some family-history research. He asks her out and sends red roses. He is not what he seems. It is Cochrane who has been watching Barbara's house, and he now searches the hotel room, then visits Barbara and holds her at gunpoint, demanding to know where the money is. Ken walks into the trap. Rocky phones the police and creates a diversion, and Ken overpowers Cochrane.

Alan Clews wrote the episode and Brian Lighthill directs, with Sheila Gish as Barbara and Valentine Pelka as Cochrane.

The mystery is well managed, because the letters are a plausible way for a criminal to flush out a hidden fortune, and the audience, like Ken, spends the first half trying to decide whether Ronnie is alive. The closing scenes belong to Rocky. He is the one who saves Ken, and then he quietly buys flowers for Laura.

The cycling story is lighter and settles into a standoff between two sets of embarrassing facts, which is a less satisfying kind of ending. The letters story carries the hour.