Twelve Bar Blues

The episode opens with a stripper murdered in a Middle East nightclub, and asks what that has to do with Jethro Blackstock, a man who runs a talent agency and lives very comfortably on the South coast. The answer, when it comes, runs through arms going missing from local military establishments, which is a big enough crime to earn the unit's full attention.

Tessa takes a job as a barmaid in a seedy pub to get closer to the operation, which is the kind of undercover work that involves a lot of wiping glasses and listening. The pub work gives Tessa some of her best scenes of the season, all customer smiles and sharp eyes. Maggie, for her part, runs into an old flame, Derek Moore, who warns her that Blackstock is dangerous company. The warning is worth listening to, and the girls are already convinced Blackstock sits at the centre of the arms smuggling.

Andy de la Tour wrote it and Gerry Mill directed. Tony Selby's Jethro Blackstock is a proper seaside villain, all bluster and money, with Linzi Drew as the Stripper, Harold Gasnier as a Businessman, Jan Ravens as Sal, Freddie Earlle as the Landlord and Andrea Allan as the Barmaid, while Leslie Ash's Fred, Tracy-Louise Ward's Tessa, Jill Gascoine's Maggie and Don Warrington's Nigel work the case.

The episode is at its best when it stays small: the pub, the talent agency, the men running a smuggling operation out of a respectable front. But Blackstock is the kind of villain the show does well, charming enough to have fooled people for years. The talent agency front is a good joke in itself: his business is finding people, and he has been hiding in plain sight among them. The Middle East murder gives the whole thing a cold opening, and the show keeps that coldness in its pocket for the ending.