War Games

A young secretary who grew up in Hastings falls to her death from an upper floor of a London food company's headquarters, and within days there is a burglary at the country house of the company's owner that nobody has reported and in which almost nothing was taken. Agnes Browne worked for Empire and European Foods, owned by the industrialist Sir Reginald Walker, and it is the unreported, barely productive safe job at his house that interests Foyle more than the loss. The prime suspect is a safecracker recently released from prison, Harry Markham, who has since joined the local Home Guard.

The burglary draws Foyle into a chain of old business. A barrister, Stephen Beck, a German who fled to Britain in 1935 and is now secretly working for British intelligence, is a friend of Foyle's, and it emerges that he met Markham days before Markham's death and also knew the dead secretary, a coincidence that ties both deaths and the burglary to something reaching back to Germany. The case is complicated by the return of Jack Devlin, the sergeant Foyle had before Milner, now an army captain: six months earlier Devlin planted evidence against Markham and Foyle was forced to drop the charge. Markham is then shot and killed during large-scale army exercises on the Downs, with Foyle acting as police referee. The death is treated as a training accident, but the third shot, fired at point-blank range after two apparent near-misses, fixes it as deliberate. A salvage competition in which local children collect scrap aluminium, glass and waste paper turns out to be how the evidence reaches Foyle.

The killer is Simon Walker, Sir Reginald's son. Empire and European Foods has struck a secret agreement to supply fats and food to the enemy on the Continent regardless of who wins the war, against the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1939, and the family's dealings with the Nazis, including the proceeds of looted Jewish property, are why people around the company are dying. Agnes Browne had begun to ask questions about the deal and was pushed from the company window; Harry Markham had broken into the safe on Beck's instruction and taken a small silver box that mattered to the Walkers, and was shot during the exercise to recover what he knew. Foyle confronts Sir Reginald and his son and exposes both the trade and Simon's hand in the two deaths; the surviving summaries are thin on the mechanics of each killing, and the attribution to the son rather than the father rests on a single source. The film also introduces Hilda Pierce of British intelligence, who handles Beck and will use Foyle rather than serve him, a figure the series returns to for years.

The strength is Alan Howard's Stephen Beck, a man who has lost his country, his wife and in a sense his name, and who is using Foyle without quite betraying him. The weakness is density: a company, a safe, an exercise, a returning sergeant and an intelligence agent all compete, and the two killings are not equally explained. What distinguishes it is the corporate villain, which takes the series' crimes beyond the town into London boardrooms and Berlin, and the first appearance of Pierce, which prepares the run's later move into espionage. Laurence Fox's Simon Walker is played as a believer rather than a profiteer, which is what the film's argument needs, and Emily Blunt appears in one of her earliest roles as Markham's sister.