The Sting

A young woman who has kicked a drug habit asks Lovejoy to trace a pair of Meissen figures she sold during the dispersal of her late father's estate. The money had fed the habit, and Meissen is the kind of porcelain that makes collectors reach for their cheque books, so the pieces will not have gone far without leaving a trail.

The trail turns up something else first. Lovejoy comes across clear evidence that Charlie Gimbert has double-crossed somebody, and he decides to get even. What began as a favour for a woman trying to put her life back together turns into a settling of scores, and somewhere along the way the statuettes matter rather less than the principle. Gimbert runs the local auction house and is a man Lovejoy has to deal with constantly, which makes the score personal as well as professional. It went out on 20 January 1986, three days after The Axeman Cometh, in a January when the series was still finding its feet. For all the talk of porcelain, the episode is really about trust in a trade where everyone keeps a ledger of favours and slights.

Ian La Frenais and Jonathan Gash wrote it, Baz Taylor directed. Ian McShane anchors it as Lovejoy, with Phyllis Logan as Lady Jane Felsham, Dudley Sutton as Tinker Dill, Malcolm Tierney as Charlie Gimbert, and Chris Jury as Eric Catchpole. Kika Mirylees plays Carinna, Denys Graham is Bigelow, Cassie Stuart is Amanda, Jo Ross is Helen, and Geoffrey Bateman is Dandy Jack.

The case starts in desperation and ends in the usual murk of the trade. Even a favour carries a price in Lovejoy's world, and Gimbert discovers that double-crossing a divvie is not a sensible career move. The Meissen gets found. The score gets settled. And nobody in East Anglia is surprised that the two came as a package.