Fingers

An old Debussy manuscript goes missing from an exclusive piano emporium, and Pru Standfast is asked to find it. The thief turns out to be an attractive young man with a genuine love of music, which is the episode's first joke: he is charming, and charming thieves are the most dangerous kind.

He is also part of a family business. The Truscotts are a dynasty of thieves, and not all of them are as harmless as the young music buff who started all this. The family angle is the fun of it: a whole clan of crooks who treat theft as a trade, with the young one's taste for music marking him out as the soft spot. Pru has to work out which Truscott is playing her, and the answer shifts as the episode goes on, which keeps the whole thing moving nicely.

Anthony Skene wrote it and Robert Fuest directed. Rosalyn Landor's Pru leads, with Phyllida Law as Jessica Truscott, T.P. McKenna as Billie Truscott, Michael Thomas as Dev Truscott, Dermot Crowley as Detective Insp. Flynn, Priscilla Morgan as Miss Willis, Philip Voss as Mr Jenkins and Patrick Marley as Mr Pope, with Jill Gascoine's Maggie and Leslie Ash's Fred in support. It went out in June 1985, in the run-up to the first series finale. Phyllida Law, who plays Jessica Truscott, is Emma Thompson's mother, and she gives the family matriarch a patience that makes the clan feel real.

There is real pleasure in a caper that respects its subject: the piano emporium feels like a place that exists, the manuscript matters to people, and the theft is treated as an insult to the music, not just to the insurance. Phyllida Law and T.P. McKenna give the Truscotts the air of a family firm, which is exactly what they are. And the Truscotts, thieves to the bone, are the best company the show has had in a while. It is the sort of episode that makes you wish the show did more straight capers.