Hit List

The episode opens with a massacre: an Arab prince and a group of foreign associates with Mafia connections are gunned down on a country estate, and the obvious question, who did it, turns out to be the wrong one. But the shooting is the surface. Underneath is a drug racket fronted by an international casino consortium, and the bodies are just the invoice.

The case spreads across nationalities and organisations the way these things do. The Triads are annoyed that the Mafia is taking a slice of their action, and once two such groups start settling accounts, innocent and guilty alike get swept up. The casino consortium is the kind of front that only works because nobody at the tables asks where the money came from. The episode keeps the map of who hates whom clear enough to follow, which is no small thing when the guest list reads like a United Nations roll call.

Gerry O'Hara wrote it and Raymond Menmuir directed. The casting is international on purpose: Martyn Read as the 1st Observer, James Marcus as the 2nd Observer, John Salpeas as the Arab prince, Steve Rome as the American, Stephen Gressieux, Louie Mears and Romolo Bruni as the Italians, Fernand Monast and Gérard Dimiglio as the Frenchmen, and Debbie Arnold as Wendy Lucas, with the regulars working the case around them. It went out in April 1986, early in the second series, with the unit in its new shape: Rosalyn Landor's Pru was gone, and Tracy-Louise Ward's Tessa had joined Maggie, Fred and Nigel.

There is a cold efficiency to the plotting that suits the subject: the crime world here is a business, and the violence is quarterly reporting. There is a grim humour in the body count, too: the opening massacre turns out to be barely the first draft of the violence. It is not the warmest episode of the run, but it is one of the most clear-eyed about what the unit is actually up against.