Honeytrap

Yuri Yevgenev, a Russian secret agent, ends up in a local police station after Maggie Forbes and the Special Branch set him up. The KGB want him back, and they are not in the mood to be polite about it. Before long Maggie's own life is on the line, taken in a way that leaves her facing the sort of questioning she has spent her career avoiding.

Tessa and Fred dig into how it happened and find the leak: a Home Office secretary passed on the information that led to Maggie's capture. The betrayal is small and ordinary, a secretary selling a detail, and it makes the danger feel closer than any foreign operation could. The police station setting gives the early scenes a properly British feel: cups of tea, formality, and a prisoner nobody quite knows what to do with. The rescue that follows is properly dramatic, Fred and Tessa arriving with the clock running down and Maggie saved from what the episode has made clear is coming.

Terence Feely wrote it and Robert Fuest directed. Jill Gascoine's Maggie spends the episode in more peril than usual, with Brian Hawksley as Sir Frederick, Mark Wingett as Rider, David Sumner as Yuri, Robert Cartland as Muirhead, Tomasz Borkowy as Slav, Ron Emslie as the Barman and Patrick Wright as the Desk Sergeant, and Leslie Ash's Fred and Tracy-Louise Ward's Tessa doing the rescuing. It went out in May 1986. Mark Wingett, who plays Rider, was already known as Jim Carver from The Bill, which gives the police station scenes an instant air of authenticity.

The episode's best decision is making the leak domestic. The KGB are the threat. But the wound is closer to home, and that sting stays with you after the rescue is over. It is the show's reminder that the unit's real weakness was never a foreign service. It was the person with access.