The Big Burn

Some valuable antiques go missing from a country house, and when they turn up they have company: electronic listening bugs, foreign in design, fixed to the pieces. It is a strange little crime, half burglary and half espionage, and it pulls Maggie Forbes, Fred and Tessa into both worlds at once. The case is a good puzzle because the pieces don't belong together, and the show lets you wonder why before it tells you.

The trail leads to the home of Joe McCrewer, a jailed forger, and the question of why foreign listening equipment would end up in the house of a man already in prison hangs over everything. The answer involves the gap between the two crimes, the international and the local, and the people who move between them. That gap is where the interesting characters live, and the episode knows it.

Terence Feely wrote it and Alan Bell directed. Neil McCaul's Joe McCrewer is the man at the centre of it, with Jeffrey Robert as Jones, Tim Faulkner as Lennox, Mark Drewry as Mason, Donald Churchill as Henry Woods, Robert East as Inspector Saunders, Andy Lucas as Ted, Rachel Davies as Gloria McCrewer and Arhlene Allan as Moll 1, while Jill Gascoine's Maggie, Leslie Ash's Fred and Tracy-Louise Ward's Tessa run the case. It went out in May 1987. Terence Feely, who wrote it, also wrote Freezeheat and Honeytrap in the second series, and no one on the staff could do a cold-blooded threat like him.

The episode is at its most interesting when it is about the objects: antiques that are also listening posts, a forger's home that is also a piece of the puzzle. Gloria McCrewer keeps the household going and makes you wonder what she knows. It is the smallness of the detail that makes the big crime feel real, and the show knows how to make the discovery properly unsettling.