Big Game Hunt

Big Game Hunt is a case about a husband who hires a detective to follow his wife, and about what the detective finds when he looks at the husband. Vincent Brack summons Ken to watch Nina, his wife. Ken follows her to a pub, where she changes into a tarty dress and a blonde wig and slips out unnoticed. The next day he is ready, and follows her to a club where she works as a hostess and singer under the name Susie.

He talks to her, expecting the worst, and she tells him sharply that she is not a prostitute: she does not do tricks. She is desperately unhappy, she says, and her husband beats her regularly because he believes she is having an affair.

Meanwhile the Bisons, a secret society much like the Freemasons, are holding a meeting at Woodcote Park and drinking a great deal. One of them, Derek Donaghue, is stopped for drink-driving on the way home.

When Ken and Harry compare notes, they find that Vincent Brack is both a Bison and a Vice Squad policeman, and that he has been encouraging his fellow members to drink and then tipping off the police so that they will be caught on the road. He seems more interested in making sure they are caught than in stopping them from driving at all.

Ken tells Nina that her husband has hired him but that he is on her side. She tells him that she and Vincent once had a daughter, killed by a drunk driver, which accounts for his harshness towards drinkers. She also suspects that he has been taking money from the owner of the club, Laker, in return for keeping it safe from Vice Squad raids.

Ken and Harry give the police their evidence. Brack will be dismissed and may be charged. Nina decides to leave and return to London. Ken goes to the railway station and asks her to stay, but she refuses.

Rocky's side story belongs to Helen, who sends him to sell some of her chairs at an antique shop. The assistant, Roxanne, sees that he knows nothing about antiques and cheats him. He and Helen get their own back by inviting her to dinner at Woodcote, where Rocky vanishes on the pretext of booking a room, and Helen makes her pay the bill.

Andy de la Tour wrote the episode and John Woods directs. Frances Tomelty plays Nina and Ewan Stewart plays Brack.

The strongest element is the husband's motive. A policeman who sets traps for drunk drivers because his child was killed by one is pursuing a private revenge under cover of duty, and the same grief that explains him is what makes him dangerous. It gives the villain more depth than most of the series' villains, and it makes Nina's refusal to stay with Ken credible: she has a life to rebuild, and a past that he cannot repair.

The weakness is the Bisons themselves, a pleasantly daft secret society whose role in the plot is to supply victims. The hunt of the title, a policeman stalking drinkers, takes second place to the marriage, and IMDb users rate the episode low, but the ending, in which Ken fails to keep someone he has helped, is unusually sad for the series.