Burning Ambition

Burning Ambition turns Ken's weakness for a damsel in distress against him. It starts with Lorraine Simpson, a red-headed teenager just released from borstal after serving a sentence for arson. She has kept a newspaper cutting that announces Ken's move from fireman to private detective, and the episode wants us to wonder why.

Then a woman who calls herself Fiona Harper, staying at a nearby hotel, comes to Ken. She wants evidence that her husband, Dennis, is having an affair, and tells a tale of being thrown out of her own house with only the clothes she wore, while his girlfriend moved in. Ken falls for the story completely. He watches the house and sees Harper with a woman, who is in fact his wife, Sue, and agrees to help Fiona break in to recover her belongings.

Inside, she fakes a burglary and vandalises the house. Ken takes her to the station, where she gives him a necklace she took from the house as a token of thanks. She gets straight off the train, tells the police, posing as a jeweller, that a man has tried to sell her a necklace, and a neighbour's description of Ken does the rest.

He is arrested for the burglary and has difficulty persuading the police that Fiona exists. He is about to be charged when his friend DS Hatchard, whom Harry has called, steps in.

The truth lies in 1985. Dennis Harper's warehouse in Birmingham caught fire, and Ken, still a fireman, helped to put it out; a colleague, Andy Blake, was killed. Ken caught the arsonist on the premises, and it was Lorraine, Harper's daughter by an earlier partner, Liz Simpson. Sue Harper does not know that Lorraine exists or that the fire was arson. Lorraine is getting her revenge on Ken, whose evidence convicted her, and on the father who abandoned her and her mother without a share of his profits from the fire.

Harry's subplot is lighter. A man called Len Drumgold wants to store some furs in Harry's warehouse. They turn out to be live rabbits, bound for cosmetic testing, and after a neighbour calls the RSPCA Harry takes them to a children's farm.

Andy de la Tour wrote the episode and Robert Chetwyn directs. Robin Weaver plays Lorraine and Ronald Fraser plays Drumgold.

The reveal is the strength. The cutting in the opening scene turns out to be the whole plot, and the sequence in which Ken is led, step by step, into a burglary he believes he is helping with is a good example of the series using his character as a trap. The dead fireman links the case to the origin of the series.

The weakness is that Dennis and Sue Harper are left unresolved, and a wronged daughter's revenge on her father is passed over quickly after the arrest. But it is one of the sharpest plots of the series.