The Double Dutch Deal

Fred Smith is best man at a friend's registry office wedding, which is already an unusual day at the office, and it gets worse. The wedding is part of a racket: a marriage factory for Asian girls who want EEC citizenship, run by an organisation that treats the whole ceremony as paperwork. Fred, standing at the front, sees it from the inside.

The case pulls her towards Pieter, a Dutch boy the organisation uses, and she falls for him in the way that is always a bad idea in this line of work. The episode is honest about the racket's victims: young women paying for the chance at a new life and getting treated as paperwork. The investigation winds its way to an end that is hard to watch: Pieter is murdered, and Fred is left with the wreckage of a case that did everything right and still lost.

Martin Worth wrote it and Ian Toynton directed. Leslie Ash's Fred is the heart of it, with Steven Pinder as Pieter, Ray Burdis as Mike, Nigel Anthony as Dowson, Carol Gillies as Miss Brown, Sarah Lam as Min, Pat Keen as Mrs Heppinstall and Nula Conwell as Samantha, alongside Jill Gascoine's Maggie and Rosalyn Landor's Pru. It went out in May 1985, in the middle of the first series' spring run. Martin Worth, who wrote it, was the man behind The Sandbaggers, and he brings a spy writer's eye for institutional coldness to a marriage bureau.

The marriage racket is the sort of crime that makes you angry precisely because it looks legal, and the episode does it justice without turning it into a lecture. The registry office setting, all plastic flowers and borrowed suits, makes the fraud feel grubby in a very British way. But the last act belongs to Fred's grief, and it lands harder than this show usually allows. Some cases you win. This one you survive, and that is all.