The Bounty Hunter

The job comes in through the usual channel: an old friend rings Arthur, and Arthur rings Terry. This time the friend is a young widow named Jo, who has been swindled out of her late husband's money in a Spanish villa scam and is now driving mini-cabs to make ends meet. But Arthur, who can smell a reward from three streets away, arranges for Terry to investigate the swindler, with the promise of a cut if the cash comes back. The money is the point, but the widow makes it personal, which suits Terry down to the ground.

The swindler is Freddie Fenton, and the pleasure of this one is watching Derek Jacobi play him. Jacobi, fresh from classical stardom, turns the villa salesman into a silky, plausible horror, the sort of man who could sell you a house in the sun and have you thank him as he took your savings. June Ritchie's Jo gives the story its heart, a woman too proud to sit still while the man who ruined her walks around free. She's the best kind of victim for this show: someone with nothing left to lose except her nerve.

The case pulls in George Layton's Des, James Aubrey's Graham Hurst, Tony Steedman's Ralph Hurst, Kathleen Byron's Mrs. Hurst and Christopher Biggins's Harold, plus a young man billed as 'Mr. Booze', which tells you the sort of world this is. Terry does the legwork while Arthur does the sums, and between them they work the fraud from both ends.

Bernie Cooper, Francis Megahy and Leon Griffiths wrote it, Peter Sasdy directed.

It's one of the more sympathetic outings for the pair. Nobody is trying to con anybody for once, at least not the widow, and the sight of Arthur Daley on the side of the angels, even for a fee, is worth the ticket price on its own.