High Drains Pilferer

Terry is doing a favour for Mickey 'The Fish' Metcalfe, driving for a local gangster who is not a man to keep waiting. It's a favour with a price tag, and Terry knows it the moment Mickey's eyes go cold. The favour curdles the moment they reach the flat of Mickey's mistress and find the place turned over. Her jewels are gone, and Mickey's reaction suggests somebody is about to have a very bad week. Terry, unfortunately, knows exactly who the thief is, a sneak thief of his acquaintance who slipped in through a window during the job.

What follows is a retrieval operation, the delicate business of getting the jewellery back before Mickey decides to solve the problem with his fists. Terry has to use his wits and his driving in roughly equal measure, steering between Mickey's temper and the thief's excuses. The thief, when found, is full of reasons, none of them good enough for Mickey. David Calder makes Metcalfe properly frightening in a quiet way, the kind of man who smiles while you work out the cost of disappointing him, and Sheila Ruskin plays the girlfriend, Susie Blake.

Dave Humphries and Leon Griffiths wrote it, Robert Young directed. Patrick Malahide appears as Chisholm, Glynn Edwards as Dave, Chris Matthews as Eddie Venables, Paul Brooke as Hamster, Jeremy Child as Mandeville and Hugh Sullivan as Harbot. Dennis Waterman and George Cole hold the centre.

But there's an old saying about lying down with dogs, and Terry spends the whole episode testing its limits. The Fish's temper is the clock ticking through the episode, and Terry can hear it from the first scene. The plot is small, a handful of stolen jewels and a man's pride, but the show understands that small things are what most lives are made of. By the end the jewels are back where they belong and Terry has earned a week's reprieve from the Fish's bad side, which in this line of work counts as a win.