Is There Anybody There?

Is There Anybody There? takes Ken and Harry into a haunted house and gives it a human explanation. A client, Jim Fisk, asks them to provide security at Monkton Manor, where valuable antique fittings need guarding against a gang of professional thieves who have been scouting the place. It is a routine commission for CBS, and the two men settle in for what promises to be a dull night.

The night is not dull, and it is not comfortable either. By the morning they have learned from the housekeeper, Mrs Whitworth, that the manor was once owned by a man called Terry Carpenter, who committed suicide after suspecting that his wife was having an affair. The house, in other words, has a reason to be haunted. TheTVDB describes the episode as a spine-chilling confrontation with the supernatural.

Then Ken goes up to an attic room and finds Terry Carpenter hiding there, alive and well. He faked his own death. That changes the case. A security job against thieves becomes an inquiry into a man who has been dead for years on paper, and who has a living brother with a business deal in the balance.

The brother, Paul, is in the middle of securing a lucrative deal. When he discovers that Terry is alive, he decides on a drastic remedy: he schemes to murder the man who is already dead. A faked suicide makes a convenient cover for a killing, since nobody would look for a murdered man who has been buried, officially, for years.

David Haig plays the client and David Troughton plays Terry Carpenter, with William Armstrong as Paul and Margery Mason as the housekeeper. Helen Slavin, who also wrote Queen's Gambit and Whispering Grass, wrote the script, and Ken Horn directs.

IMDb users rate it one of the better episodes of the last series, with a score of 7.8. It brings a ghost-story atmosphere, an old house, a creaking night and a housekeeper with a history, into a series that is usually lighter, and then turns the ghost into a man with an alibi.

The premise is clear. A watchman is hired to guard a house's fittings and finds himself guarding its owner, who is supposed to be dead, from the brother who wants to see that he stays so.

It is a neat piece of plotting for a final series, and a setting that puts Ken and Harry together in a house for the night, as Two Men in a Vault had done in the sixth series.