Tranmere Dan and Tokyo Joe

Two former prisoners of war pick up a newspaper and see a face they recognise, one they never expected to see again, and it frightens them enough to call in the EYES team. What that face means is the mystery at the heart of the episode, and the show is in no hurry to tell you.

Meanwhile Tessa goes undercover as the chauffeur to a junior Government Minister whose tastes are bizarre enough that the job description alone sounds like a warning. The Minister's tastes are the sort of detail the writers clearly enjoyed, and they give Tessa's scenes a comic edge that balances the POW story. The two threads pull the team towards the same danger from opposite ends, and the episode keeps them both moving.

Jenny McDade wrote it and Dennis Abey directed. Alan Ford is the Taxi Driver, Lionel Jeffries turns up as Eddy, Phil McCall as Harold, Robin Currie as Elkins, David Savile as Simmonds and Peggy Phango as Mrs Lamb, with Leslie Ash's Fred, Tracy-Louise Ward's Tessa, Jill Gascoine's Maggie and Don Warrington's Nigel working the case. It went out in June 1986 and closed the second series. Jenny McDade, who wrote it, was one of the few women writing prime-time action television in the mid-1980s, which makes her a name worth knowing. It is the show's own wartime double act. Lionel Jeffries, a face from a hundred British films, makes the most of a small part.

But the POW thread gives the episode a proper emotional hook, two old soldiers looking at a photograph and being afraid of it, and the Minister's household supplies the oddness. The face in the newspaper stays unexplained until the show is ready, and the patience pays off. It is a good double act of a story, and it ends the second series on a note that keeps the show's mix of the serious and the strange intact.