Bird of Prey

Eddie Dean kidnaps a young girl to stop her mother testifying against a crook named Burton, and the case lands on Dempsey and Makepeace with the clock running. The only man who can find Dean is Keith Lymon, Dempsey's nemesis from The Bogeyman, and Lymon is in prison. So the plan is simple to state and awkward to execute: get Lymon out, and persuade him to help. The mother is the main witness in a drug trial, which explains why the kidnap is meant to keep her off the stand.

David Wilks wrote it, Roger Tucker directed. Nick Brimble returns as Lymon with the same imposing stillness, and the episode gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that Lymon owes Dempsey nothing and wants nothing from him except a reason to say yes. Annabel Leventon's Christine Bayly is the desperate mother, Alexandra Avery's Lucy the snatched girl, Robert Pereno's Eddie Dean the villain of the piece. Kevin Quarmby's Munro and Andrew Dunn's Det. Con. Austin, a few years from Dinnerladies, fill out the edges. It first went out on 4 October 1986, and Nick Brimble's return is treated as the event it is, with the show giving him room to be dangerous rather than simply loud.

And the reluctant alliance is the heart of it. The show does not pretend the debt runs both ways; the negotiation between the two men is the real plot, with the rescue as the stakes. Dempsey has to swallow his pride, and Lymon has to decide whether helping the man who caught him is worth it. The episode gives both actors the space to play the standoff, and the result is a confrontation that never throws a punch.

It is a tense, satisfying sequel to The Bogeyman, and it proves the series knew exactly what it had found in Nick Brimble.