The French Drop

In occupied France a British agent code-named Facteur is parachuted in near Rouen and killed almost at once, stepping on a mine. His death is registered far from the field where it happened, because Facteur was a man of the Special Operations Executive and the SOE was already at war with the older intelligence services. Major General Sir Giles Messinger, of MI6 and formerly the director of Section D, is locked in a dispute with Colonel James Wintringham over the organisation Wintringham commands. In Hastings, Christopher Foyle is handling the small change of wartime crime while looking for a way to contribute more directly to the war. He visits the Admiralty to see his brother-in-law, Commander Charles Howard, hoping for a post at Naval Command in Liverpool. The approach comes to nothing, and on a later visit to SOE premises he runs into an ex-convict he had helped put away some four years earlier, a man using the name Mason and otherwise known as Leo Maccoby.

A body is found in Hastings after an explosion in a bookshop. On the evidence available it looks like Messinger's son William, who had taken his own life, but the facts do not fit one another. Foyle follows the discrepancy to the SOE and its training establishment at Hill House, described in the episode as its school for dirty warfare, where he meets Wintringham and Hilda Pierce, the woman officer modelled on the real SOE officer Vera Atkins. With Milner and Samantha Stewart working alongside him, Foyle establishes the true identity of the body that does not match the story attached to it.

The answer is substitution. Facteur and William Messinger were the same man, and the bookshop explosion and the removal of the body were not the suicide they appeared to be but part of a cover-up mounted to keep MI6 from shutting the SOE down. The episode is unusual among the run in having no conventional murderer at its centre; the crime is a cover-up by the British state, and the summaries on which this account rests do not spell out who died in the bookshop or how the substitution was managed. Foyle's decision is to let the cover stand. He stays quiet about the SOE's blunders over the Facteur mission and accepts Messinger's accusations that he has mishandled the investigation. The cost is the naval security post he wanted, and he accepts it on the judgement that he has done the more useful thing for the war effort.

That ending is the episode's strength, because Foyle solves the case and then chooses not to say so, and the programme lets him live with the choice rather than rewarding or punishing him for it. Ronald Pickup's Messinger has the manner of a man used to being obeyed, which makes Foyle's quiet refusal to correct him land harder than any argument would. The weakness is in the mechanics: the intelligence plot's detail, what happened in the bookshop and who moved the body, is thinner in the record than everything around it, and the episode depends on the audience accepting the cover-up without being shown how it was done.

As a series opener, The French Drop sets the season's template and drew its strongest audience, around 9.10 million viewers. It also introduces Hilda Pierce, a figure the series later promotes from supporting officer to lead, and it is the first wartime episode in which Foyle's own side is the party he is protecting.