Once Your Card Is Marked

A murder pulls Palfrey into his first case for the Coordinator, and the suspicion around it is already set. A misfit diplomat is under pressure from every direction, with his handlers convinced he is spying for the Soviets. The official line is that he should be nailed. Palfrey does not take that line at face value. He believes someone is making the man a scapegoat, and he decides to find out why, which means following the motives and the people who would benefit most from the man's fall. It is a lonely position, the one the diplomat occupies. Everyone around him has already decided, and the evidence looks tidy enough to satisfy most people. But Palfrey has never been most people.

The episode establishes the show's favourite method early: Palfrey reads official stories for their seams, treating a routine case as a puzzle of who stands to gain. The murder at the centre of it is the visible damage. The interesting question is who arranged it, and the answer, when it comes, is quieter than the crime itself. There is no heroics about it; Palfrey's work happens in corridors and quiet offices, and the excitement is in what is said between the lines.

George Markstein wrote it and Christopher Hodson directed. Alec McCowen heads the cast as Palfrey, with Caroline Blakiston as the Coordinator, Clive Wood as Blair, Briony McRoberts as Caroline, David Buck as Springer, Valerie Holliman as Susan, Alan MacNaughtan as Dr Crawley, David Quilter as John McNair, Michael Elwyn as Schneider and Antony Brown as Kilpeck.

The title carries the warning, and it is a good one for a spy series to hang on its wall: once your card is marked, the suspicion never quite washes off. The man at the centre of this story knows exactly how that feels.