Set A Thief

Dempsey and Makepeace witness a young woman being run down in the street, and what looks like an accident turns out to be anything but. She was a model, and her connections run from the fashion world up into drug trafficking and members of parliament. The pair have to climb a long way up from their usual beat. It went out on 12 October 1985, and its real subject is the distance between a London pavement and the corridors where the powerful sit.

Dave Humphries wrote it, Tony Wharmby directed. The cast does the class friction well: Jonathan Steward's Clarendon, Hugh Ross's Van Gelder, Edward Peel's Sullivan, Karl Howman's photographer, Mark Jones as Clarendon's assistant, Jadie Rivas's Janine. Eric Deacon's Paul Davis sits somewhere in the middle of it, and Tracey Childs, Malcolm Terris and Richard Mayes are among the guests. Ray Smith's Spikings is on the roster as always, holding the office end while the investigation climbs the social scale. It is a deep bench of character actors, the kind that lets a police case carry half a dozen distinct personalities.

The title is the old proverb about setting a thief to catch a thief, and the episode earns it: the investigation keeps turning up people who know exactly how the game works because they play it themselves. Makepeace, who knows these circles the way Dempsey knows a street corner, is the natural guide for this one, and the episode lets her lead. She reads the players the way her partner reads a bar full of suspects, and the episode enjoys the difference between those two sets of eyes.

It is the sort of hour the show did quietly well, street-level policing opening a door onto something much bigger, with the leads doing the opening. The result is a case that feels bigger than its running time, which is the best compliment an episode of this kind can be paid.