The Black Magic Man

The episode starts inside a Special Branch safe house, where two women held for questioning about entering the country illegally are waiting out a long night. The safe house is the kind of place nobody talks about: a flat above a shop, people coming and going at odd hours, neighbours who have learned not to look. Into this walks a cat burglar, and before anyone can work out whose side he is on, he has helped one of the women out and gone with her. Maggie Forbes is left to chase both of them through a city that would rather not be looked at too closely.

It is a chase story, and a good clean one. Maggie follows the thief because he holds the answers, and the thief follows the woman, and the episode keeps moving fast enough that you don't stop to ask why a professional burglar would take that sort of risk for a stranger. His reasons stay his own. The chase is the point.

Ray Jenkins wrote it and Ben Ringham Terry directed. Jill Gascoine's Maggie carries most of the running, with Eric Deacon as Ryan, Michael Aldridge as Teal, Rachel Meidman as Rebecca, Jadie Rivas as Francoise, Kenny Ireland as Ford, Stafford Gordon as Pollard, Alan Maurice as PC Wall and June Marlow as Mrs Richards, while Rosalyn Landor's Pru Standfast keeps the unit end going.

The safe house opening is properly claustrophobic, all locked doors and people who don't trust each other. Once the chase moves out into the streets, the show relaxes into the kind of pursuit it does well. And for once the running order puts Maggie's stubborn streak front and centre: she doesn't lose people, even when the trail runs through every kind of neighbourhood the city has. It is a reminder that in this line of work, the strangest jobs start in the smallest rooms.