Hors De Combat

Frank Price is sprung from jail, only to be killed by his own accomplices. Spikings suspects Price's boss, Jack Lang, but when Lang's granddaughter Debbie is kidnapped it begins to look as though someone else is trying to light a gang war and let Lang take the blame. The opening jailbreak is handled with the right amount of noise, George Leech's first warder and Rocky Taylor's second doing the unglamorous work of getting a man out and then watching it go wrong.

Dempsey's contribution to the case is largely romantic. He is busy wooing fellow American Angie Hughes, played by Catriona MacColl, and the courtship runs through the episode like a holiday postcard dropped into a war report. The show always knew how to leaven the bodies. It went out on 8 February 1985, and Jonathan Hales wrote it hot on the heels of the previous episode, the two scripts sharing a taste for mixing the rough with the romantic. Catriona MacColl, best known to genre fans for Lucio Fulci's horror films, gives Angie a warmth that explains Dempsey's distraction.

Jonathan Hales wrote it, Christian Marnham directed. Derek Ware's Price has the unenviable job of dying early, Godfrey James's Jack Lang carries the weight of it, and Michael Carter's Hurst and Elaine Ives-Cameron's Mrs. Prescott-Lowell fill out the world. Ray Smith's Spikings works the investigation end while Dempsey works on his charm. Among the guests is Christopher Ellison, better known to a generation as DCI Burnside of The Bill, with Stephen Greif and Chris Webb alongside.

It is a busy hour that runs gangland politics and a love affair side by side, and it manages both without dropping either. But the kidnapping of Debbie is the hook that keeps you watching, and the episode knows it. Whatever else is going on, a child in the middle of a gang war raises the stakes beyond the usual.