War of Nerves

A War of Nerves begins with an undercover assignment and a political instruction, and ends with the murderers, the thieves and the fraud all dealt with by a single act of the man carrying the bomb. Sergeant Milner goes into the building trade to attack organised crime and finds racketeering at the Talbot shipyard, while Assistant Commissioner Rose directs Foyle to look into the communist Raymond Carter, who is in Hastings with his fiancee, the painter Lucinda Sheridan. Carter refuses the enquiry, Sheridan explains his commitment to the People's Convention, and Foyle later learns that she is Rose's daughter, which puts his superior's instruction in a different light.

The case proper starts at an unexploded bomb. A bomb-disposal unit is called to the shipyard, made up of Captain Ralph Hammond of the Royal Engineers and two men, Jack Archer and Ernest Jones, and while they are on the site they find a cache of money and steal it. Foyle works the fraud from the other side, learning from the shop steward Derek Woodgate that the Talbot brothers have been drawing wages for four hundred men when only two hundred are employed at the yard, the shortfall taken out of the government's contracts. Jones is then abducted and found dead, killed by the Talbots' men, and the fraud becomes a murder case that also puts the bomb-disposal unit's theft in the frame.

The resolution is one of the series' most complete and its most unusual, because no one left alive is available for a court. Hammond tells the Talbot brothers that he will return the money he took if they give him a share of it, and what he hands over is not the money. He booby-traps the suitcase that is supposed to contain the cash, and when it is opened it kills Hammond himself, the Talbot brothers and the men who killed Jones. The embezzled funds are returned to the government. The episode closes on the radio announcement of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which places it at the moment the war opened a new front. The departure, a murderer killed by his own device before he can be arrested, is written into the plot rather than offered as a twist.

The strength is the convergence: the payroll fraud, the bomb-disposal theft and the political enquiry into Carter are separate for much of the running time and then become one investigation, and the argument underneath them is that the fraud and the theft are both ways of robbing the state. Corin Redgrave's Rose is the episode's engine, since the instruction to investigate Carter looks like political policing until the family connection is disclosed, and the performance plays both readings. Anthony Howell's Milner is given the undercover work and then moved aside as the case grows, which keeps him present without making him the solver, and Peter Capaldi gives Carter conviction rather than caricature, so the audience has to weigh his politics for itself.

The weakness is the alignment, because the three strands are slow to meet and the Carter enquiry is at its thinnest while it is still standing apart from the fraud. The episode carries the shipyard racket from a real case, the Liverpool fraud of Frederick Porter in 1942, whose ship-scaling business embezzled more than 300,000 pounds, and it ends series 3 on the opening of the Eastern Front as well as giving Rose his fullest outing in the wartime run. It is the last episode before the programme's first transmission gap.