Killing Time

July 1945, and the soldiers waiting in limbo to be shipped home are the episode's subject as much as its setting. Foyle is investigating a set of nighttime robberies whose victims are apparent war profiteers, and the trail leads him to the United States military base near Hastings, commanded by Major Wesker, where a military policeman, Sergeant Calhoun, runs an illegal betting ring. At a town council meeting Foyle opposes a proposal, pressed by the Americans, to impose racial segregation on the town's facilities for as long as the remaining troops are waiting to leave; he argues that segregation is not the English way, and is voted down.

The domestic strand runs at the guesthouse that Samantha Stewart and Adam Wainwright have begun running. Mandy Dean, an unmarried mother with a mixed-race child, is lodging there, thrown out by her mother, without money and unable to pay her rent, and other lodgers leave because of the child. Her former boyfriend, the boxer Tommy Duggan, returns from Scotland, where he was sent as a conscientious objector to dig drainage ditches, to find her disowned and a mother by another man; hurt, he turns to drink. The child's father is an African-American soldier, Private Gabe Kelly, who appeals to Wesker for permission to marry Dean.

Dean is found dead and Kelly is arrested, the base closing ranks with the black soldier as the obvious suspect, and Foyle is not convinced by his confession, especially once the robberies and the killing appear to be connected. He uncovers that Calhoun and Wesker organised the robbery of the United States payroll, and that Wesker killed Dean, strangling her after forcing her to have sex with him in return for favourable treatment of her visa application. Kelly is transferred back to the United States, and Duggan cares for Dean's daughter in the meantime. The sources do not name the male accomplice who carried out the holdups with Dean.

Its strength is the parallel it draws between an individual murder and an institutional crime, so that the base's own officers turn out to be the real offenders: a killing dismissed as open and shut against a black soldier, set against a robbery committed by the men who command him. It is the only record in the run whose central subject is segregation in the American military, and one of the few written by a screenwriter other than Horowitz.

The weakness is the plotting, judged the weakest of the three series 6 records, on the ground that the intersecting storylines are not strongly written and seem contrived exactly where they need to convince. The resolution does ask the audience to accept a coincidence between the robberies and the killing. The episode still matters as the run's most direct engagement with the black American presence in wartime Britain, a subject it returns to later, and it gives Foyle's regulars a civilian domestic base for the first time.